


The Jane Doe on the Autopsy Table

by Dreamcatcher37



Category: Bones (TV), The Autopsy of Jane Doe (2016)
Genre: Animal Death, Blood and Gore, Forensics, Gen, Just a ton of forensics, RIP, aw man Micah doesn't have a tag I love that guy, there's a lot of dead bodies guys just to warn you, wait this is the Bones fandom you guys are chill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:14:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23727421
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dreamcatcher37/pseuds/Dreamcatcher37
Summary: Late at night, a body from Virginia arrives at the Jeffersonian with orders for an urgent autopsy.  The night quickly turns into a fight for survival--and a race to find out what happened to their Jane Doe before the Jeffersonian team joins the long list of her victims.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 29





	1. Stage 1

Her body laid motionless, white as marble, on autopsy table 01. Dark hair (a shock of color against her waxy skin) was tucked neatly under her head. Delicately curved brows framed deep brown eyes, staring at the soulless steel ceiling above. Her mouth hung open, dry as bone. And even though the room was kept cool, her skin (all uncovered—smooth and white as alabaster) didn’t react. Nothing about her stirred. Nothing on the surface, at least.

Dr. Camille Saroyan spoke to the recorder in the room.

“Jane Doe 812-657 was received by the Jeffersonian at 3:03 this morning, with orders for an immediate autopsy. This autopsy will be done in three stages, starting now, with the external examination. Subject is a Caucasian female, with brown hair and brown eyes. 5’9”. Very freshly dead. I’d estimate no more than…hours. Maybe minutes.”

With gloved hands, Cam felt of the body’s wrist and elbow joints. Supple, easily bent. She turned the arm over, too, to look for blood pooling under the skin. “No sign of rigor or livor mortis.” Cam said.

A flash lit up the room. Angela Montenegro re-positioned her camera and took another shot.

“What’s so special about her?” Angela wondered out loud. “I mean, the Jeffersonian powers-that-be even dragged the _daycare lady_ out of bed to watch Michael Vincent. Who _is_ this girl?”

“A Jane Doe. For now.” The paperwork Cam was given didn’t say much else—it was mostly redacted. Walls of black text. That wasn’t Cam’s concern, though. They had a job to do. Nothing more, nothing less.

“Must be important…” Angela stopped to rub her eyes. The late hour was getting to her, robbing her of her mental filter. “What am I saying? Every child we see like this is important. She had a family…And a name.”

“We don’t know she was a child. X-rays of her epiphysial plates will narrow down her age.”

“ _Look_ at her.”

Cam was trying not to. “Age appears to be in the 16-25 range.” She said for the recorder.

The two women lapsed into a familiar silence as they worked—Angela documenting Jane Doe’s face for future identification, Cam taking a blood sample to run a tox screen. Finally, Angela sighed.

“Seeing a young girl like this…hurts.” Angela admitted. “Usually they don’t have faces when we get them. How do you do this?”

“It gets easier with experience.”

“Easier, not easy…Does seeing girls like this hurt more, now that you have Michelle?”

Cam’s jaw tightened, and she hesitated just half a second too long before she answered.

“We have to put up professional barriers, Ms. Montenegro. This is just a body. We’re here to find the circumstances around her death—that’s what’s going to give her back her name.”

Angela just nodded, knowing Cam was right. Dr. Saroyan had to put up more professional barriers than most, being a black woman in a cutthroat white man’s field. Even if Angela didn’t like that, she could respect it. Cam prepped a liver temp thermometer while Angela continued photographing.

The body let out a moan.

Angela pulled her camera back in an instant, looking back at Cam with alarm. The camera’s lens fogged a little bit from Jane Doe’s breath. The forensic pathologist stopped with the sharp probe just above Jane Doe’s skin—but she didn’t seem alarmed.

“Fresh bodies do that. It’s all right.” Cam reassured Angela, before pushing the thermometer into Jane Doe.

“How do you do this?” Angela asked again.

“Well, I usually don’t have to do this at 3 A.M., in a dark, empty lab…Liver temperature is 75.6 degrees Fahrenheit.” Cam pulled the liver temp probe (looking awfully like a large cooking thermometer) out of Jane Doe’s side. It made a wet little sound.

Blood ran from the wound. Now, that made Cam pause. A little blood was to be expected—humans were chock full of the stuff—but like that? It was almost like—

 _Beep, beep, click_. Someone unlocked the autopsy room door and swept inside, interrupting Cam’s thoughts.

“Good morning.” Bones said, a little dryly. “I see we’ve already started, and—…there’s no bones.”

“Good morning to you, too. Dr. Temperance Brennan will also be assisting this autopsy.” Cam said for the record.

“I’d like to, but I’m not sure how I can be of assistance. These remains are still covered in things like tissues and organs.” Bones fought back a yawn.

“Great observation skills, sweetie.” Angela said. The late hour was getting to them all.

“I’m a forensic anthropologist. Why was I called in now? And in a storm? I had to get my children up.”

“Storm?” Angela asked, a little concerned. “The forecast didn’t say anything about rain.”

“Meteorology is barely a science. More a series of…educated guesses.”

“Did you get Max to babysit?”

“No, he didn’t answer his phone. Christine and Henry are at the Jeffersonian’s daycare. Booth got called in as well…him, I can understand. He’s a federal agent. I work with bones. And these are not bones.”

Cam spoke up. “I know it’s late, and these are not bones. I’m sorry. But the powers-that-be are calling for a full examination. We’re working with a skeleton crew for this emergency autopsy, and it’s all hands on deck. I’ve got x-rays for you.”

“X-rays? Already?”

“The records recovered from V.C.U. mentioned skeletal trauma. We took the x-rays as soon as we received Jane Doe, in case she had any implants that could get us an I.D. quick. That nice security guard helped—what was his name?”

“Micah?” Bones passed him on the way in. He always had a smile and an anecdote for her.

“That’s the one.”

While Cam moved the body to do a vaginal and rectal exam, Bones crossed to the x-rays, already displayed on one wall of screens. Her blue eyes flitted around. There was a lot to take in there. Bones barely knew where to start.

“No seminal fluid visible on examination…” Cam said, swabbing anyway to be sure. “…Just more dirt. Jane Doe was buried. And not just buried, packed into the soil, hard enough for it to invade her orifices. I’ll take samples for Hodgins, but this all appears to match the soil from under her fingernails and in her hair…wuh-oh. Insect activity.”

Jane Doe kicked. Or maybe her foot slipped on the table, no one really saw. Angela just carefully replaced her leg, letting Cam collect samples. 

“There was a bug? Up her butt?” Angela asked, trying not to gag in front of her boss.

“That’s one of the first places bugs go to start snacking on a body…but even if she was buried, she doesn’t appear to have been dead long enough for insects to burrow in. This is a mystery for Hodgins.” Cam placed the soil sample in a properly-labelled dish. “Can you pass me that tray?”

Angela did, and Cam grabbed a speculum. She was hoping she wouldn’t find anything but dirt. What she found was much worse.

“Oh. Jane Doe suffered vaginal trauma…a lot of it. The tissue is healed, scarring present from an inch past the labia all the way to the cervix. And the scarring presents in lined formations. This was done with a tool. Perhaps a blade. Documenting now.”

At Cam’s gesturing, Angela steeled herself, and got in position to take pictures of the damage. The artist reminded herself that this was for Jane Doe. Boy, she’d love to see the face of whatever sick sonofabitch did this, as she presented this evidence on the stand.

“That’s not all.” Bones said. Her tone was flatter than usual. It must have been bad.

“Dr. Brennan, what are your preliminary findings?” Cam asked.

“Extensive healed trauma to the radii, ulnae, and carpals. Complex fractures. Both her left and right wrists were shattered.” Bones pointed as she went. “Same with the tibiae, fibulae and tarsals. This couldn’t have been one instance. Her wrists and ankles were broken with a blunt instrument, possibly while resting them against a hard surface.”

“Any estimate for a time frame?”

“I’d estimate…a year. The density of this new bone growth appears to be a year old. It’s strange, I’d expect evidence of surgery, at least the use of plates and screws to heal fractures like these...Anyway, her epiphysial plates—”

“How old was she?” Angela couldn’t help asking.

“16-18 years. Jane Doe’s bones show Harris lines. Her growth was stunted in spurts, either by malnutrition or disease. Her ribs are another point of interest. Their growth was manually restricted. I’ve seen this type of deformation in corset-wearers. The style she wore was older, with a straight figure as opposed to today’s curved corsets. Look at these breaks in her ribcage…do they look familiar?”

Cam looked, but bones weren’t her specialty. (Angela fiddled with her camera, very much not looking.)

“They were made by rib cutters. She’s had some form of heart surgery. As well as brain surgery. This line, it’s healing bone, and it travels the circumference of her cranium.”

“We’ll know the details when we get inside. Good work, Dr. Brennan. Do you want to continue with her teeth?” Cam asked.

Even at the late hour, Bones was excited to look at Jane Doe’s teeth. The facts they’d uncovered so far were strange. Maybe some new ones would help piece together this puzzle. Angela stood with camera at the ready to take pictures of her teeth—helpful for dental record identification. Newly gloved-up, Bones opened the Jane Doe’s mouth.

“Oh. Her tongue is scarred, too. It seems almost…wrong. Like it’s the wrong size for her mouth.” Angela said. It looked pinker, newer, than the tongue behind her scars. But Angela didn’t know what to make of that.

“Teeth are in good condition, despite her poor diet. Front teeth have a gap. Number 17 is missing.” Bones reached in with a tool to move Jane Doe’s tongue to the side. Her lower left molar was missing. Gums had grown in to fill the holes, making this an old injury—just like the rest of them.

“Abrasions.” Bones said. “The majority of her teeth show faint abrasions. I’ve seen this in remains from the poorest communities. She brushed by chewing on a twig and rubbing it across her teeth. Here…a splinter, stuck between her teeth. That goes to Hodgins. No flossing, see the cavities in between?” With a mirrored tool, Bones examined the tooth neighboring number 17.

“I don’t think she’ll be in any electronic database.” Angela said.

“Maybe she will. 17 was removed by metal instruments.” Bones indicated the marks on 17’s neighbor. If that was done by a dentist, maybe she’d be in their records.

“I want a strontium isotope test done. Can you pull?” Cam asked, holding out a beaker already labelled for the test.

“Of course. 17 is gone, so we’ll use 32. Angela, can you hold her?”

The body let out another half-formed moan. This time, it was Bones that jumped.

“Not used to bodies talking?” Angela asked, a hint of a teasing smile on her face.

“No, I knew—I know they do that.” Bones said.

Angela held Jane Doe’s jaw while Bones set to work. Usually an intern held the remains, and Angela was far away when the tooth-extracting happened, but this was a skeleton crew. All hands on deck. Angela did her job well, and soon with a popping sound, Bones wrenched the tooth free.

“All in one piece.” First try, too. Sometimes they shattered. Bones admired the molar.

The lights flickered, and Jane Doe’s jaw twitched.

“…I’ll get this into the machine before the storm gets any worse.” Bones said, tucking it into the waiting beaker. “And in the meantime, I’ll work on my other cases. I’ve done everything I can do here.”

“Our first priority is _this case_!” Cam reminded Bones—but the forensic anthropologist was already tossing her gloves in the trash can, on her way out. Soon enough she was gone.

In the quiet that followed, Cam and Angela could barely hear rain start to patter on the roof high above.

“It’s like herding cats…” Cam muttered to herself.

“Yeah, well, I’ll give you a break. I’ll take these to Hodgins. You don’t even have to ask.” Angela (camera hanging around her neck) carefully picked up the tray of samples.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Just remember this when it’s time for a raise.”

With a wink, Angela was gone, too. It was just Cam, her audio recorder, and Jane Doe. It reminded her a bit of her days as a New York City coroner. Late at night, all alone, just her and a body…Cam changed gloves and readied a tray of instruments. A lot of forensic pathologists were helpless without their interns, but not Camille Saroyan.

“Continuing the autopsy.” Cam said to the recorder. “Now I’m beginning the second phase—the internal examination.”

Picking up a scalpel, she paused it just above Jane Doe’s chest. And paused. And paused. Even with Bones’ estimation of her age, Jane Doe looked so young…

Dr. Saroyan took a deep breath, and cut.

***

Rain pattered against the windows of the nearly-deserted F.B.I. headquarters. The only other sound was the air conditioner, and a lone janitor vacuuming somewhere deeper in the building. Fluorescents blinked every once in awhile (damn those cheap things) as Booth tried to focus on the papers scattered all over the conference table.

“Could she be Sabrina Aisenberg?” Booth wondered out loud.

“I don’t think so. Agent Booth, what are you looking at?” Dr. Sweets asked.

“Computers are on the fritz. I got these faxed over from N.C.M.E.C., our Jane Doe’s got to be in here. Virginia authorities must’ve missed _something_.” Booth answered. In truth, it was more about him being restless than Jane Doe likely being in N.C.M.E.C.’s databases.

“If she’s anywhere, Angela will find her.”

“I gotta start somewhere, Sweets…What are _you_ doing?”

Where Booth had taken over the conference room’s table, Sweets had taken over the whiteboard. The files they’d gotten were redacted. But not as much as the files the Jeffersonian had gotten. Sweets got a better look at Jane Doe’s journey to D.C., and he’d written it out on the whiteboard, in shorthand fashion.

From Booth’s perspective, it looked like maybe…a worm. A worm with bits labelled. There was a doodle of a sun with glasses on one corner, that didn’t seem very F.B.I.

“It’s a timeline. Starting when Jane Doe was unearthed in Grantham.” Sweets said. “First, there was the Douglas House crime scene.”

“Yeah, yeah. Alvarez broke in to dump the body—”

“Allegedly.”

“— _Allegedly_ , then he and the Douglases killed each other.” Family annihilations were rare. Booth hated to see them.

“Then the Tilden Funeral Home.”

“Local county coroner. His son was about to leave town with his girlfriend. Family argument gone wrong.”

“Forensics support that, okay. Then Virginia Commonwealth U. Another emergency autopsy not completed. A coroner and two mortuary science students found dead.”

“Electrical accident.” Booth flipped through the papers he was given. Damn the F.B.I. and their paperwork. “’Preliminary findings’ are…teacher smashed a light against the table, but the blood on the floor transferred the shock to him and his students too. Jesus, what…?”

“Then the ambulance.”

“The ambulance.” Booth repeated.

They’d gotten footage of that crime scene—the most evidence they’d been handed yet. An ambulance flipped over in a ditch by the highway, doors hanging open. It was closer to D.C. and its swamp. Everything was still, painted by the flashing lights, a mirror of the scene printed across the ditch-water. It looked like the crew tried to crawl away. Even though one of them was missing his legs. In the center of it all hung Jane Doe, still buckled into her gurney, now hanging upside-down in the crashed ambulance.

The fluorescents flickered again. Outside, the wind picked up.

“…This is the world’s unluckiest dead body.” Sweets concluded.

“Yeah, well, after so many years in this job, I’ve stopped believing in luck. Or coincidence. Something isn’t right here.” Booth started packing up—throwing papers into files with little care.

“Where are you going?”

“The Jeffersonian. Something isn’t right, Sweets, I’ve gotta check on Bones.”

“Isn’t your wife, like, a blackbelt?”

“Lecture me about sexism later. You’re coming with. Wanna know why?”

Sweets sighed. “Because you’re my ride home?”

“Because I’m your ride home. Let’s go.”

***

Hodgins sat in the semi-dark, hunched over his workbench. He worked best in gremlin conditions. That, and his ball python Stanford needed a light-dark schedule to regulate its developmental hormones.

But mostly the gremlin thing.

The dirt was…boring. Peat, from the Massachusetts area, rare these days—but not rare enough to narrow down a location. The bug, however…

He had the insect’s pupa casing set out before him. It was a fragile specimen, but very well preserved, for how old it must’ve been. Dr. Jack Hodgins was a one-man etymology department, and he’d already narrowed down the specimen to a single species. (Where was his ‘King of the Lab’ crown? He hoped Cam hadn’t thrown it out, like she tried to throw out Stanford. Once Stanford had pooped out the phalanges it’d eaten, it had no ‘evidentiary value’. Well, it was valuable to Hodgins.) Hodgins was busy narrowing down the sub-species, looking back and forth from the pupa casing to his one lit computer screen, when he noticed something.

There. Just above the paragraph break. A shape in the reflection.

A person.

Someone was standing behind him.

It was a miracle Hodgins didn’t throw the pupa casing across the damn room. He just banged his hand on the table, jumping in surprise.

“ _Christ_ , Angie!” Hodgins wheezed. “Why do you walk so _quietly_?”

Angela couldn’t keep the smile off her face—she didn’t _like_ scaring her husband, but when it happened naturally, it was so goddamn funny.

“Because you’re so easy to spook when you’ve stayed up late watching horror movies.” She gave Hodgins an ‘I’m sorry’ kiss on the head. “And when you sit all alone in the dark, like some kind of vampire.”

“Hey, the dark is good for Stanford. He doesn’t have eyelids. Let him nap.”

“Mm, wouldn’t want to upset Stanford…”

Angela cast a look to the snake. It sat in a ball, staring at them with one big black eye. ‘Ball’ meant ‘scared’, according to Hodgins—while Angela didn’t have much love for the creepy thing, it did have a sweet mouth and a shy disposition. Angela hoped she didn’t spook Stanford, too.

“Do you have any results yet?” she asked.

“Yes! Yes, yes, and it’s weird.” Hodgins rubbed his hand and clicked through the results on his computer. “Everything I’ve got says she was buried in old dirt. Old, old dirt, probably in this section of New England here.”

“That doesn’t line up. I saw this body, Hodgins, she couldn’t have been dead long enough to go from Massachusetts to Virginia to D.C.”

Hodgins shrugged. “That’s what I’m getting. Maybe we’ll know more when we get an I.D.”

Angela’s lips pursed as she scanned the map of New England.

“…No luck on the I.D.?” Hodgins guessed.

“No. Nothing on any database, anywhere. I tried everything I could think of.”

“That’s a lot of things.” Hodgins wrapped his arms around Angela’s waist.

“The storm’s messing with my equipment, too. It must be getting bad out there…”

“What storm? There wasn’t a storm on the forecast.”

“Well, there’s one now…I hope Michael Vincent’s okay.”

“Come on, you know he sleeps just fine in storms. You’re the one that—“

A horrible static cut Hodgins off. It sounded like a radio skipping madly over channels. (A snippet of ‘Brown-Eyed Girl’ played.) Finally it settled on,

_Mom-my told me something…a little girl should know…_

Hodgins cursed and raced to unplug the monitor. Angela covered her ears. She couldn’t hear anything over the din—or even after Hodgins yanked the power cord, killing the computer altogether. Her ears rang for the longest time.

“What was that?” Angela asked, barely hearing herself.

“It did that earlier. God, every couple of minutes now—this last time was the loudest.” Hodgins said, scrubbing at his ears. “I thought it was something on your end. Or the I.T. guys’ annual prank.”

“Not a very funny prank.” Angela was going to tear them a new one, for scaring her like that.

“I.T. guys aren’t a very funny people. They gassed my beetles, Angie. I walked in tonight, and they were just dead. Stanford’s been inconsolable all night. I think he knows something’s up with his neighbors…”

“You can get new beetles, babe. I’ll fix the computers. And I’ll look harder in New England for our Jane Doe. Do you think—”

This time, what cut them off was a distant scream. Screams around the Jeffersonian weren’t so rare. A rat would pop out of a body, or someone would spill that awful break-room coffee on themselves…but at 3 A.M., in a deserted Jeffersonian, screams were a different story.

“That sounded like Dr. Brennan.” Hodgins said.

Angela was already at the door.

It _was_ Dr. Brennan, and she was on the move, going from exam room to exam room, looking in each one. She stepped gingerly over a trail of putrefaction. Not good. This was not good.

“Someone’s moved them! Without my permission!” Bones yelled into the empty Jeffersonian.

The Russian spy, the one they’d found partially liquified in a bathtub, was gone when Bones went in to continue his examination. If he was stolen, it was a shoddy job. The exam table where his remains lay was still covered in…well, his remains. Putrefaction lay in puddles all over the table. Drops and gobs of liquified fats made a trail out the door. The important bits—his bones—were gone, and that’s what sent Dr. Brennan into a tailspin.

“Someone stole my remains!”

It took an embarrassingly long time for Dr. Brennan to realize no one was there. She had to call security herself. Ducking into an exam room, she picked up the landline by the door, and dialed for help.

A voice answered in two rings.

“Jeffersonian Security Office, this is Micah Reeves.”

Bones didn’t waste any time—she started babbling into the phone, laying out exactly what was wrong and exactly what needed to happen. She needed a full investigative team. And the building needed to be shut down, all doors and windows guarded. When she finally paused for breath, she expected the other voice to come back, affirming her orders. There was nothing.

She waited a few seconds longer. Still nothing.

There was just static—like auditory snow. And maybe…something underneath. _Was_ there something underneath? Bones held her breath and listened.

_…open up your heart…let the sun…shine…_

The noise was deafening.

But not the noise from the corded phone—the alarms, blaring and echoing through every hall of the Jeffersonian. Emergency lights flashed. Outside—it was coming from outside, from the platform. Someone tripped the sensors on the platform! The thieves were right out there!

As soon as Bones formed that thought, the emergency shudders were already halfway down.

“No, wait! Wait!” she cried to no one, dropping the phone.

Clear plexiglass was blocking her only way out—and it was falling fast. By the time Bones got to it, there was only about a foot of space left. She could’ve slid under, and risked it crushing her. But she didn’t. It clicked into place, and Bones rattled it on its track. Oh, the irony…one of the reasons she chose the Jeffersonian was their security.

The sirens felt like railroad spikes driving into her head. Bones covered her ears and tried to look out. Nothing moved on the platform. No one was up there, and her other case—the mummified remains found in the Valley of Fire—lay unmoved. The sterile white sheet that covered them for the night was still in place. Where were the thieves?

A little bit of movement caught Bones’ eye. Across the lab, she could barely see Hodgins and Angela, rattling their own door. They were caught in lockdown, too.

“Isn’t there an emergency override?!” Hodgins asked, an edge of hysteria in his voice.

“I’m trying! I didn’t design this lockdown protocol!” Angela shouted back, trying every card-PIN combo she could think of.

“What the hell set it off? The storm?!” Hodgins put his face up to the glass and looked.

Nothing was on the platform, but that’s where the enemies would want you to look. Hodgins scanned the dark edges of the room. He saw movement in every shadow. And when he saw the people in the front of the lab, Hodgins almost jumped.

“Look, look!” he got Angela’s attention. “It’s the Men in Black! It’s _our_ Men in Black!”

Stuck in the antechamber, between two sets of glass doors that wouldn’t budge, Booth and Sweets were just as confused as the rest of them. Booth tried to pry open the doors. The emergency release wasn’t working—something was definitely wrong.

The sirens, louder than life, weren’t helping.

“Nothing’s working!” Sweets let go of the fire alarm. It seemed the whole world was going crazy. “Can you see Bones?”

Booth leaned against the doors, eyes darting wildly around the lab.

“Yeah, she’s—hold on. That’s Angela. I can’t… _there_ , there she is. Exam Room 6. They’re safe.”

“Safe?”

“For now, yeah.”

Bones didn’t feel incredibly safe.

The lab beyond Exam Room 6 was lit only by the flashing emergency lights. Bones still scanned the lab for any signs of her remains or the thieves that took them. From her vantage point, she could see one other player enter the mix—from the hallway to the right of the entrance. A squat, male figure. Only when he wandered into the flashing lights did Bones recognize him.

“Micah! Someone stole my bones!” she yelled, knocking on the plexiglass.

Security guard Micah didn’t see any intruders, either. He meandered up to the forensics platform. Finally, _finally_ , he put an end to the screaming sirens by swiping his card. But the lights didn’t stop flashing. That was odd. But not odd enough to rattle Micah—he had a job to do.

He started his sweep of the platform by on one end. It was quickly apparent that nothing was amiss. Nothing had been moved, not even an instrument out of place. The mummy they’d brought in yesterday was still laying under its sheet. On any other night, Micah might’ve stolen a look. The science they did at the Jeffersonian was fascinating, really.

Someone was tapping. Micah looked up.

“Dr. Brennan! Don’t worry, we’ll get you out in just a moment.”

Bones was yelling something—gesturing to her door. Those hadn’t gone up, either. Odd. Well, first things’ first. His sweep of the forensics platform was almost complete. Micah had his back to the white sheet…

…when it began to move.

It took a second for Bones to register what was happening. Something—some _one_ —was under the sheet. She banged on the plexiglass door, hard enough to shake it in its mooring. Every warning she shouted just rang in her ears. Micah couldn’t hear her.

“What?” the security guard asked, getting closer to Exam Room 6. The movement put him right in front of the white sheet, back to the movement. “We’ll get you out. Just one moment, Dr. Brennan.”

Light swept over him. When it passed, he was in darkness for a second—just a split second. Then the light came back.

The figure under the white sheet was sitting up.

Bones’ voice broke as she tried to scream out a warning. She knew he couldn’t hear her, but still, she tried.

“…Dr. Brennan?” Concern crossed Micah’s face.

Then the figure below the sheet wrapped an arm around his throat.

It happened faster than the eye could see. One moment the security guard was fine. The next, he was lifted off the floor, eyes bulging and shoes kicking. He fought—of course he fought. He tore at the sheet and the arm underneath, but nothing could move it, it was like steel.

“Oh my God…” Angela breathed.

Booth didn’t waste any time—he whipped off his jacket, wrapped it round his fist, and started punching at the locked glass door. It wouldn’t break. Fuck it—Booth dropped the jacket and went at it with his bare fists. Still, the glass held, and Micah’s struggling got weaker and weaker. They were watching him die. And they couldn’t do anything about it.

After an eternity, the thing holding Micah dropped him. Or maybe it and the white sheet disappeared. It was there one second. Then the next, it wasn’t. The security guard crumpled to the floor of the platform, and like magic, Exam Room 6’s door started sliding up.

The door underneath Angela’s hands unlocked too. It even opened for them. Just an inch. Angela and Hodgins stepped back. They weren’t going out there, just rushing into a trap—but Bones was. As soon as the door was open far enough, she slid under, and was running for the platform before she could even think about what she was doing.

Micah was still alive—Bones could see this as she knelt down on the grate beside him. He moved weakly. Clawed at his throat. It was the wrong shape, all crushed cartilage and pooling blood.

He was going to die. Bones saw this, too.

Still, she clutched at his collar, trying to loosen it, trying to do _something_. He couldn’t get oxygen. If he could just get oxygen, he’d be fine…

Bit by bit, life left his eyes. Bones watched it happen. Soon he was still, blue eyes staring up at the glass ceiling, reflecting the blinking lights of the crane that loomed above the Jeffersonian.

He was still. But something below him moved.

Just past Micah’s shoulder, past the grated floor of the forensics platform, something white twitched. It was…a sheet. Like the ones they used to cover remains. It was under the platform, and something was under it, moving along the cables and pipes with a skittering noise. It gathered dust as it went.

_Bang._

It moved quick, hitting the platform hard. Bones felt it as well as heard it. She let go of Micah and fell back. The white sheet followed her. Where she couldn’t see it, she heard it, that dry skittering noise.

_Bang, bang._

Bones scrambled to her feet.

“We’ve gotta get Booth out. Booth has a gun, we’ve gotta get to him.” Angela stammered.

Hodgins took a deep breath. “You’re right. Okay. Okay, on three, we’re gonna run for it!”

Angela cringed (hating everything about this half-baked plan) but took Hodgins’ hand and braced herself to run. Hodgins swung the door open.

“Okay, one, tw—”

“Go! Just go!” And Angela took off, not letting go of Hodgins.

In the antechamber, the rhythm Booth worked up was faltering. He was getting winded, and if he continued, he’d break his hand. About six strikes ago, he thought he was getting somewhere. But the crack he saw disappeared before his eyes. He’d just imagined it. Two figures were coming at him from the lab—was he imagining those, too?

No. Hodgins and Angela appeared out of nowhere, frantically trying to get the door from their side. Angela tried the card-slot from her side, sure if she could just figure out where the error was, she could get the door open.

“The release—on top of the door, the release!” Hodgins shouted.

“We tried! It’s stuck!” Sweets shouted back. “Nothing’s working!”

On the forensics platform, Bones let out a half-formed scream. The thing under the sheet was moving at an alarming pace. Like the spiders that had crawled out of the Valley of Fire mummy. The thing had backed her up against the forensics platform railing. Like it knew it had her trapped, it stopped attacking just to circle, almost curiously examining its prey. It reached up to slip its fingers through the grate by Bones’ shoe.

Its fingers were skeletal.

Hodgins and Booth tried to pry open the doors again. That was going as well as Angela’s frantic attempts. The number-pad wasn’t even responding. Angela didn’t know what she was doing. Every idea had failed. She brushed her hair out of her face…and saw something.

A figure. Standing to her right. Down the hall. Another security guard?

No, it was strange—a thin neck and limbs, a swollen belly. As Angela watched, it got closer. She never saw it move—with one flash, it was 10 yards down the hall. With another, it was more like 5. It had moved closer to the lights. Angela could see it when the next flash lit it up. She knew what it was.

The remains from Exam Room 2. Bones’ missing remains.

“Booth! Here!” Finally, something Sweets said broke through to Booth. He turned and the younger agent was holding out a fire extinguisher—one he’d just pried from its place in the wall. Booth took it.

For a moment, Angela just stared at the thing down the hall. It was framed by cold steel walls—a gruesome and impossible picture. They stared at each other, in fact. Until the thing slowly opened its jaw and let out an unearthly sound.

Angela’s screams were cut off by the sound of shattering glass.

Booth managed to bash in the bulletproof door. With just one more swing it all caved in, scattering across the floor, glittering like diamonds. Booth dragged Sweets through and they were running. Someone grabbed Angela—Hodgins, it was just Hodgins—and pulled her along with them. She lost sight of the thing. It didn’t give chase.

“Who else is here?” Booth asked over the alarms.

“Cam! In the back!” Hodgins managed to put together a whole sentence in the chaos.

“Go!” Booth ordered. No one argued.

Bones was still trapped up against the back railing of the forensics platform. When she turned, Booth was there, arms out to help catch her. Bones practically vaulted over the railing. She didn’t know what was going on, but she knew she needed to run.

A skeletal hand covered in a white sheet closed where Booth’s heel had just been. They got to Cam’s autopsy room safely—the last ones to arrive—letting the door close and lock behind them.


	2. Stage 2

The first thing that greeted them was Dr. Saroyan, with a scalpel outstretched.

“It’s us! It’s us, Cam!” Booth said.

It took a second for Cam to process that. She let out a breath and replaced the scalpel on its tray, mumbling an apology. Booth set to securing the room. Break-in protocol said Cam should turn all lights off—so she’d waited in the dark for rescue (or the threat) to come to her. Booth flipped the lights on, and it was a much calmer scene. Everyone could see the unplugged monitors and Cam’s messy hair.

“You havin’ a rough night there, boss?” Hodgins asked.

“Something like that. What happened? An intruder? It looks like our computers were hacked.”

“An intruder. It must be.” Bones agreed, voice shaking a little too much for her liking.

Sweets was looking around the room like a tourist. He usually wasn’t invited to the Jeffersonian, and he’d never seen this place. His eyes landed on the body in the center, and immediately he looked away. It felt voyeuristic to look at Jane Doe, naked and so vulnerable on the autopsy table.

“Is that her?” Sweets asked. The body that caused so many deaths…she looked much smaller than he imagined. She’d been sliced, but not laid open, not yet. Blood ran down her sides and shoulders.

Booth nodded. “That’s her. And I have a hunch someone’s been following her around, trying to prevent an autopsy. This Jane Doe’s been at the center of _four_ …now _five_ …crime scenes.”

“That would’ve been nice to know before we got her!” Hodgins snapped.

“I’m not getting any service.” Cam held her cell phone up, smacking it once or twice. This was a process she’d gone through before the rest of her team crowded into her office. Just like before, and just like her computers, her phone was glitching at a rapid pace. It was useless.

The others followed suit. No one’s phones were working, even if they were able to dial for help. It was all static. (And Hodgins had left his phone in his lab, playing soft jazz for Stanford.)

“No phones. Damn, these guys are good…” Booth said, followed by a few more curses. He couldn’t reach the daycare center to make sure his kids were okay…Booth resisted the urge to throw his phone across the room.

“What do they want?” Bones asked. Booth was good with that sort of question. “They took the remains of the expatriate, and the mummy from Nevada.”

“I saw it.” Angela spoke up. The first words she’d said since they gathered in the autopsy room.

“…Saw what?” Bones asked gently.

“The body. Not her—the—the jelly one. It was up and walking around by itself, I _saw_ it.”

“That’s…impossible.”

Impossible like skeletal fingers reaching through a grate. Impossible like Jane Doe’s time of death.

“Hey, don’t say ‘impossible’. What just happened out there with the lights and the locks, _that_ was pretty impossible.” Hodgins said.

Bones fixed him with a look. “Did you see it, too?”

“I saw… _something_. If Angela says it was the remains, then I believe her.”

“Whatever it was, that security guard just _died_ —” Sweets cut in.

Everyone started talking at once. The noise in the autopsy room grew and grew. Finally, Cam banged the hilt of her scalpel against the autopsy table and shouted over everyone else.

“Hey! _Hey_!” Only when all eyes were on her did she continue. (Being a cop in New York lent itself to her crisis management skills.) “This is my lab, and while we’re in it, we’re going to stay calm. The danger’s out there. We’re secure in here, aren’t we, Booth?”

“Yeah, well, secure as we can be.” Booth gestured to the wall of glass. Most of it was lined with tables and machines. The door—the only part that wasn’t covered—Booth had dragged a desk to block. The intruders might see them, but they couldn’t get in.

“Your gun?”

“What?”

“Your gun, Seeley, where is it?”

On instinct, his hand went to his holster. Then he remembered it wasn’t there. Booth let out a sigh.

“The front desk guard. I had to leave it with the front desk guard. It was that or spend ten minutes checking it in, and for all I knew, you were already dead. _One guy_ shoots up an office in D.C. and now we have all these _rules_ —”

“Yours?” Cam fixed Sweets in her gaze. The young man held up his hands.

“I don’t carry it everywhere. I’m a psychologist!”

“Okay. No guns. Everything’s bulletproof here anyways.” Cam said. “No phones. We’ve dealt with worse. What else do we know?”

“Micah. The security guard, he…was killed.” Bones said.

Cam fought to keep her face neutral. She had a death grip on the autopsy table, where no one could see. Beneath the latex gloves she still wore, her knuckles were white.

“Whoever’s here means business. Do we know who’s here?”

“It could be the Russians.” Hodgins offered, taking a seat on a stool next to Angela.

“The timing’s too much of a coincidence. They’ve gotta be here for her.” Sweets gestured towards the Jane Doe (without looking).

“Nine bodies across two states…someone really doesn’t want us to finish this autopsy.” Booth said.

“Then we have to keep going.” Cam said.

“Excuse me? What about nine bodies—”

“Ten bodies.” Bones corrected.

“— _Ten_ bodies do you not understand?”

“I understand someone wants these secrets buried badly enough to kill for them, Seeley! And I understand no one else has gotten them! It’s our duty to find the facts of this case. And we’re in good hands with you standing guard—gun or no gun. Do you agree?” Cam asked.

Booth argued with himself for a minute. Eventually, he had to agree.

“Is everyone else okay with—”

“Yes.” Bones cut Cam off. The forensic anthropologist was already snapping on gloves.

“Everyone?”

Even Angela nodded. Cam took a deep breath.

“All right, then.” The forensic pathologist said for the record. “We’ll continue with Stage 2 of the autopsy.”

***

_It’s all about the Devil, and I’ve learned to hate him so…_

“I wish they’d stop doing that!” Hodgins shouted over the noise from the tablet.

“I’m on it, I’m on it…” Angela said.

The tablet’s screen was glitching out—it was hard for her to click on anything, with the apps blinking in and out like some manic child was clicking at random. Even worse was the sound. That song from earlier was back—but it was cut with screams that faded in and out. Finally, Angela found the volume controls and muted them. Or rather…broke the software, severing it from the speakers. Cam could be mad at her later.

After a moment, the glitching faded. The lights returned to normal, too.

“It’s fixed. For now, at least. You’ve got two test results waiting—do you want to look at those?” Angela offered the tablet to Cam first.

Cam took it—and pored over the results quickly. She didn’t know when the tablet would glitch and play that song again. She was getting rather sick of it.

“Tox screen showed high levels of atropine, scopolamine, and hyoscyamine.” Cam read off. “These would work as paralytics, but why these three?”

Hodgins got a look at the tox screen over Cam’s shoulder and recognized the toxins. “Datura poisoning. They’re in plants of the Datura family—better known as Jimson weed, devil’s weed, or witch’s weed.”

The lights flickered.

“That would make a murder very easy. It’s all natural, too. But with levels like these, most of it’s already been metabolized. Jane Doe would be close to waking up.” Cam said.

“If she wasn’t dead.”

“Right.”

“Jimson weed grows all over. But you know what doesn’t? _Acer lachesis_. It’s a species of tree related to the sugar maple—it almost went extinct, but after some conservationists got ahold of it, they planted it in a few botanical gardens in New England. You found a sliver of it stuck between her teeth.”

“Jane Doe was found hundreds of miles away from New England.”

“Maybe so. But she was buried up there first.” Hodgins pulled up his findings (already logged into the Jeffersonian’s servers) on the tablet, handing it back to Cam. “The dirt you found on her? There was some Virginia red, sure—I’d kill to have crime scene samples but what can you do—"

“Focus, Dr. Hodgins.”

“She was first buried in _peat_. The species of peat moss, preserved in the soil around her body? Lowland Massachusetts. And the insect pupa casing? Lowland Massachusetts. Now _that_ was strange.”

“ _Now_ we’re getting strange?” Angela asked.

“ _Yes_. That species— _R. styx_ —it burrowed in and pupated for three months.”

“There has to have been a mistake.”

“I’ll say. The last _R. styx_ pupated about 350 years ago. They were all killed off by an invading carrion beetle that arrived with Dutch colonists.”

While Cam stood mute, taking all of this in, Bones borrowed the tablet. If anything was going to prove where she came from, it would be the strontium isotope test.

“…Isotope testing concurs. Jane Doe grew up in lowland New England. Sea level, by the looks of it. A place with no fluoridated water.” Bones agreed.

“Everything, _every_ test we’ve run, says this body is very, very old.” Hodgins said.

“That’s impossible.” Bones fixed Hodgins with a look. A scathing professional-disagreement look.

“What do the carbon-14 readings say?”

Bones hesitated. She wouldn’t look down at the tablet. When she finally did, she stared at it for a long time, clicking back and forth, re-loading the test results again and again…

“Let’s play with this idea.” Angela said. “She could be from a little town with no doctors, no toothbrushes, and very old dirt.”

“She could be Amish. Or a hardcore re-enacter. Some people travel the country, living like they’re in the Civil War or colonial times. They even raise children like that.” Sweets agreed.

“A re-enactor could fit. The corseting, the dental and medical work…Dr. Brennan? Do you have thoughts?” Cam asked.

“…The damage to her teeth.” Bones started, finally looking up from the tablet. “I’ve seen striations like those before, just not on any modern remains. Tooth removal used to be done with a ‘dental key’. The tooth was gripped by a ‘claw’, and a ‘key’ was turned to mechanically wrench the tooth out of its socket.”

“Ouch…” Booth muttered. The lights flickered and the storm lashed the roof.

“It isn’t used in modern times…for obvious reasons.”

“Sounds more like a torture device.” Sweets added. The lights flickered again.

“No, that was to prevent disease. What was done to Jane Doe could be classified as torture. Hobbling, genital mutilation, oral mutilation...”

“That’s—that’s incredibly significant to this case. Why didn’t you mention this before?” Sweets asked. (The obvious answer was, they were being chased by corpses. Bones didn’t say this.) “Those were all incredibly personal injuries. Think about how much rage you’d have to have, to do that to a person. To work for hours—I’m guessing this took hours—to take away her power.”

“We can’t make guesses at what her killers—…power? They did this to take away her power?”

“Yes, Dr. Brennan.” Sweets braced himself for the mocking. “Maybe literal power, maybe symbolic power. Her mouth, what did they do to it?”

“It appears they used a bladed instrument to cut her tongue. Maybe an attempt to remove it.”

“They wanted to remove her ability to speak. They hobbled her so she couldn’t move anywhere on her own. And they mutilated her—her—”

“Both her vagina and cervix.”

“—Now that’s the most personal of all.”

Bones nodded along. “I’ve seen female genital mutilation in many cultures. Most often it occurs when a group becomes superstitious and deeply misogynistic. They try to destroy the source of a woman’s ‘life-giving power’.”

It was a rare day, when Dr. Brennan agreed with Dr. Sweets. The younger doctor felt like the world really was coming to an end. Next hell would freeze over, and the Georgia Bulldogs would beat the Florida Gators…

“So far, we’re looking for a sect of American men who hate women. That should narrow it down.” Cam said dryly.

“Speculation is useless.” Bones said. (Sweets thought it was nice while it lasted.) “The facts are all that matter. Jane Doe spent her formative years in Massachusetts, coming into contact with a rare tree, where she was later buried in peat, coming into contact with a rare insect. How she got from there to here is a matter for the agents.”

“Dr. B.” Hodgins said calmly. “Look at the carbon-14.”

Bones sighed, and Cam took the tablet back from her.

“What’s the deal with carbon-14? English, please.” Booth begged. Hodgins was all too pleased to answer.

“Back around the 1950s, when the U.S. government set off all those nuclear bombs, they scattered high levels of carbon-14 all over the globe. It’s in our air, our water, and the food we drink, so it’s locked into our bones as they’re growing. If we tested carbon-14 from you or I, it’d come back with those high levels. But our Jane Doe?”

Jane Doe stared, unmoving, at the ceiling.

“Levels indicate she lived well before 1950.”

“The carbon-14 is wrong.” Bones said, with an edge to her voice. “When this crisis is over, we’ll take another tooth and run the test again. The carbon-14 is negligible.”

“Sweetie…you’ve never called evidence ‘ _negligible’_ before. Are you all right?” Angela asked.

Bones was already moving about the room, setting up for Stage 2 of the autopsy. She took a second to register what Angela asked.

“I’m fine. I’ve worked under fire from Columbian drug cartels and Chinese separationists, I can handle _this_.” Bones set a tray down next to Jane Doe’s head a little too hard. “I’d be _much more fine_ if we could finish this autopsy. Because the carbon-14 is _impossible_. The age of this body and the time of its death is _impossible_. Everything we’ve uncovered is _impossible_ , so I’m going to run the tests _again_ and _again_ until we…until we come to a…”

A strange look crossed Bones’ face as her sentence petered out.

“…Dr. Brennan? Are you okay?” Sweets asked.

Bones moved her jaw from side to side. Her tongue played with something in her mouth. Just as she was about to reach in with her gloved hand, she thought better, and quickly whipped the glove off.

“Sweetie, what—” Angela tried to say.

When Bones pulled her fingers back out of her mouth, something bloody rolled into her palm. A tooth. Number 32, to be exact.

Cam was closest—she guided Bones to a seat. The forensic anthropologist didn’t take her eyes off the tooth the whole time. Her expression was more of curiosity than horror. Angela and Booth were on her in a second, fussing or peppering her with questions. Still, Bones didn’t take her eyes off the tooth.

“I…must’ve hit my head.” Bones said (muffled a little bit by the blood filling her mouth).

Hodgins held out an evidence dish, and on instinct, Bones placed her tooth in it. There wasn’t much in the way of medical supplies around. After some digging, Cam found the first-aid kit, tucked behind the emergency defibrillator. She dug out gauze (not sterile but clean) and had Bones bite down on it.

“Stay here. For the rest of the autopsy, understand me?” Cam ordered. When Bones started to protest around the gauze in her mouth, Cam added, “We can’t have you bleeding on the evidence.” That, Bones finally listened to.

The storm was really picking up outside. Distantly, they heard thunder, and Cam quickened her actions. She turned on Angela and handed her the malfunctioning tablet.

“Do what you can with this, all right? Get us back online. Booth, you’re on the door, you know what to do. Dr. Hodgins, you’re assisting, and Dr. Sweets? Take a seat next to Dr. Brennan. When you get nauseous, just put your head between your knees.”

“Oh, I’ll watch the door with Booth—…wait, _when_ I get nauseous?” Sweets asked.

Bones patted the seat next to her and said something like, “ _Whem_.”

Jane Doe was already flayed—her white skin slit open. Cam had replaced her skin over her organs when the alarms went off. (The Y-incision still slowly leaked blood. That was the least of their concerns.) Cam announced to the recorder what she was doing and reached into the incision with retractors.

Instantly, the platform alarm went off again. It was distant. But jarring.

“Ignore it. Push through.” Booth said. He hadn’t seen their intruders yet.

Cam and Hodgins worked to lay Jane Doe open. Cam’s work was impeccable—she’d cut through the layers of skin, fat, muscle, and parietal fascia, without marring the bones underneath or slicing the delicate organs. It was harder work than it looked. Still, when Jane Doe’s ventral cavity was exposed to the light, Hodgins sucked in a breath through his teeth.

“Wha? Wha is ih?” Bones asked. She was only barely held in her seat by Sweets’ death-grip on her arm.

“Her organs are…very clearly scarred.” Cam narrated for the recorder. “Not just one organ system, either. I’m seeing heart…lungs…liver, stomach, large and small intestine…Scar tissue presents in lined formations. Earlier we imagined she had surgery, but these aren’t surgical scars. Like the damage to her vagina, it appears random, from bladed instruments.”

“It could be shrapnel.”

“With no external scarring, Dr. Hodgins?”

“Yeah, that’s odd. We did have that case where a man swallowed a firecracker.”

“He didn’t survive that. Jane Doe here did.”

Cam dipped her gloved hands into Jane Doe’s intestines first, cutting them from their mooring and running them through her hands to examine them.

“The damage runs deep into her abdominal cavity. I’ve autopsied war vets with guts full of old shrapnel and people who’ve had hundreds of surgeries. Their scarring didn’t present like this.”

“Here’s an interesting one. It looks fresher.” Hodgins got a pair of forceps under Jane Doe’s liver and held it to the side, exposing a stomach equally scarred as the rest of her. “A straight cut right through the esophagus, and one bisecting the stomach…Seems more surgical.”

“What surgery could’ve caused these?” Cam asked, already knowing the answer was ‘none’. “That’s where we’d cut to check stomach contents. Those lines are right out of a diagram in a mortuary school textbook.”

Bones couldn’t help herself. (And Sweets tried to stop her, he did.) Before anyone could fuss at her, she’d pulled on fresh gloves and sidled up to Hodgins. ‘Mortuary school textbook’ reminded her of something. Bones finally got a good look at Jane Doe’s ribs. She ran a thumb over L2, feeling the new growth.

“This wasn’t done by a bone saw. More like…rib cutters.” Bones said around the gauze in her mouth.

Cam had to agree. The damage was more crushing and snapping than the delicate carving surgeons did. The Jeffersonian used bone saws, but other coroners with less funding did it the old-fashioned way. Cam remembered the awful _crunch_ those hedge-shear looking things made…

“Between that and the skull…It looks like she was autopsied before. Are we sure she’s dead this time?” Hodgins joked. No one thought it was funny (not even Hodgins).

“Moving on to the thoracic cavity…” Cam said for the recorder, turning away to get her bone saw.

There was a clamor and a shout behind her—like an intern had knocked over a tray. Cam whirled back around to see Bones and Hodgins standing away from the body. Its arms were out of anatomical position, and its retracted skin had been disturbed.

“She just moved! Raised her arms!” Sweets cried.

“Bodies move.” Bones assured him, rolling her eyes a little bit. She didn’t like having novices around while she worked.

“It’s called the Lazarus reflex.” Cam positioned the bone saw over Jane Doe’s R7 rib. “Sometimes they lift their arms, put them across their chests…makes my job harder. Relax, Dr. Sweets. We’re not even halfway through.”

The high sound of the bone saw filled the room. It rang off the steel walls, mixing with the sudden sound of alarms and screaming from the tablet. Angela fought the device for silence again. She’d gotten it quiet by the time they were done—but that didn’t make Angela feel much better. Sounds from the bone saw and tablet were soon replaced by distant sirens and the storm up above.

Bones placed Jane Doe’s ventral ribcage on an adjacent table. It made a delicate tapping sound. While Bones examined the damage from the corset on the discarded ribs, Cam and Hodgins peered into Jane Doe’s chest.

“More scarring on the lungs and esophagus…I don’t see how one girl could survive this many injuries.” Cam set her scalpel down on the table, taking a breath to calm her frustration. All they’d found in this body were more questions.

“Her heart’s free of scarring. I’m no coroner, but that looks the wrong size for her body. It looks like a transplant.” Hodgins said.

Cam took a closer look at that—yes, it looked different. And there was scar tissue around her arteries. The forensic pathologist could’ve thrown her hands up and called that a win—they could’ve spent the next few minutes scouring hospital databases for a heart transplant with Jane Doe’s description—but once again, this wasn’t an answer. It was just more questions.

“No, no, there’s no scarring from sutures. Or staples. The arteries were cut in the wrong places, and—and there’s no scarring on the outside of her body, Dr. Hodgins. None of these injuries are possible without scarring on the outside of her body.”

“It’s got to be _somewhere_.”

Hodgins started to examine the skin they’d opened to get inside Jane Doe. Her muscles and parietal pleura were unmarked. But Hodgins wasn’t deterred. He talked aimlessly about Japanese surgeries, minimally-invasive tools and stem cell skin creams. Eventually he did find something of interest.

“Hel-lo…what is this?” Hodgins wondered aloud.

He borrowed a fresh scalpel and scraped along the Y-incision. Just under Jane Doe’s skin were patches of dark pigments, looking like Morse code in the cross-section Cam had cut. Hodgins wasted no time getting the scraping smeared onto a clear petri dish. Luckily Cam kept a microscope in her autopsy room. Hodgins set himself in front of that and obsessively examined the scraping.

“…Ash.” Hodgins finally said out loud. “There was ash under her skin. Some microscopic bits of unburnt wood, some pollen, and some clotted blood.”

Sweets (trying very hard to not be nauseous) spoke up. “Is that another kind of torture?”

“It sounds like…tattooing.” Bones said, abandoning the ribcage to look at the edges of Jane Doe’s skin. “A very old form of tattooing, using pigments available to artists of the time. If I could just see the designs…”

“Should we peel back her skin?” Hodgins asked, scalpel ready. This didn’t help Sweets.

“No, no, don’t do that, that’s gross.” Angela rooted around in a cabinet and eventually came back with an odd light. When she turned it on, it shined purple. Ultraviolet. She put it up to Jane Doe’s shoulder, revealing faded freckles, and odd lines just beneath the corpse’s pale skin.

“Booth, lights off!” Cam directed, replacing the skin they’d just pulled back from Jane Doe’s torso.

Hodgins took the light and scanned as Angela drew the designs they’d revealed. The tattoos weren’t just letters or pictures. They were a treasure trove of symbols. Bones recognized them right away and fluttered around in an excited fervor. The more the light revealed, the surer Bones got—these designs were old.

“Another binding circle—the moon again, but that’s common in so many cultures— _that_ one. _That_ one is Wampanoag. It means rain—”

“Dr. Brennan, do these point us to anything concrete?” Cam asked.

“I believe so. I’ve only seen some of these in very, _very_ old historical manuscripts. The kind only an anthropologist would have access to. There are a lot of mis-matched symbols, such as these ones, taken out of context from local Native tribes and put in this greater design here…I believe this is an excellent example of Christian white witchery.”

Booth leaned against the door and re-joined the conversation. “Christians don’t do witchcraft. Witchcraft and Christians don’t mix.”

“Everything Christians do can be considered witchcraft. The ceremonies, the rites, the sacrifices—”

“Church is not witchcraft.” Booth cut Bones off. (This was an argument they’d had before.)

“Okay, okay—” Sweets stepped in to be the peacemaker. “Church is not witchcraft, but a very long time ago, Christianity was more aligned with what our modern culture would call ‘witchcraft’. The average person would make potions, or bury ‘witch jars’ under their houses…There were even royal white witches. Is that right, Dr. Brennan?”

“Yes. These designs would have been very familiar to clergy in colonial America.”

“No Latin lettering?”

“None that we’ve found.”

“So they’re pre-1700.”

“Pre-1700, post-1650.”

Sweets finally noticed all the eyes on him and stuttered out an explanation. “I did my—my thesis on the Salem Witch Trials. It’s all fascinating stuff…”

Up above them, thunder clapped.

“Dr. Hodgins, do your dirt findings support that timeline?” Cam asked. “1650-1700?”

“Yeah, that’d make sense.” Hodgins said (even though it made no sense at all).

“Dr. Brennan, humor me for a second. Free word associate. These tattoos—what do they mean?” Sweets asked.

Bones was hesitant, of course. But she started with one word and the rest just tumbled out. “…Binding. Binding of the feminine. Marring. Defacing. Trapping her beneath these tattoos.”

“Why would she do that to herself?”

It was Angela’s turn to speak up, holding the flashlight against Jane Doe’s shoulder to light up the pentagram there.

“She didn’t. I’ve analyzed hundreds of these. When someone’s forced under the needle, they tense up, or they fight. Over here, the lines are wobbly. And here, they’re blurred. In some places her skin ripped. She was a fighter.”

“Is anyone getting it yet? Is anyone connecting the dots?” Hodgins said, with a bit of an unhinged laugh. “This isn’t just a body from some Amish town. The carbon-14, the insect and plant matter, the missing cause of death, everything we’ve found inside her—”

“Do you have a theory, Dr. Hodgins?” Cam asked.

“New England. Late 1600s. Torture and church magic.” Hodgins said. He had a look on his face. An ‘about to drop a conspiracy theory’ look.

“Jack, please…” Angela started.

“Don’t—don’t say this is supernatural. Come on.” Booth said.

“If anyone has any better explanation? I’m all ears.”

“ _Any_ other explanation—”

And then everyone was talking at once. Behind them, behind the wall of glass, shadows moved in the Jeffersonian. The Jeffersonian team might’ve gone on forever—if the alarms hadn’t risen to a crescendo, and the vents hadn’t started spewing white smoke.

“Back! Everyone, back from the body, that’s the bio-hazard alarm!” Cam shouted over the noise.

“We cut into her minutes ago, it isn’t us!” Hodgins shouted back.

The de-contaminant fog only lasted a moment, drifting out of the vents to dissipate in the room. (It left behind a sweet chemical smell, but it was harmless.) Angela pulled the collar of her shirt over her nose and mouth. Behind the wall of glass, unseen, figures stood watching.

“You know what?” Booth muttered to himself. He was at his limit. Picking up a stool, he lifted it, and drove one of the legs into the flashing light on the wall. It shattered easily—plastic and glass falling onto a workbench—so Booth did the same with the little alarm box by the vent. That took one or two tries. Finally, it chirped twice and fell silent.

“…Booth, stop breaking my lab.” Cam said, with none of her usual leadership tone.

“Sorry. At least now we can _think_.” Booth said, putting the stool back neatly in its place.

“Guys, that wasn’t us.” Hodgins said. “There’s something in the vents. Listen.”

He was staring, almost hypnotized, at the vent high on one wall. No one spoke. A few people even held their breath. Behind the distant patter of the rain, the dying sirens and the whirring of the fan, something was moving. Slowly. But it was moving.

Suddenly there was a sickening noise—rhythmic banging and crunching—followed by a wet _splat_ in the vent just behind the grate. Everything returned to normal. Until the sounds of movement—something fleshy sliding across the metal vent—returned.

“Oh sh—someone help me with this.” Hodgins said, already scrambling up on the workbench.

“The biohazard, Hodgins—” Cam warned him.

“There was no biohazard! Something in the vents tripped the lasers! Someone could be hurt in there, or—” Hodgins went back to work without finishing that sentence, unscrewing the vent with the tools he kept in his lab coat. Booth reached up to help him pry it from the wall. The complex series of filters behind it were a little trickier, but with some creative tool use (and cursing) Hodgins swung it up.

The gap he made was only a few inches tall. Hodgins peered into it. For a tense second, there was just quiet, and the sound of something fleshy slithering closer. It didn’t sound like a severed arm (what Hodgins feared he’d find). Slowly, it got closer…

Then Hodgins turned back to the group with relief on his face. “It’s just Stanford.”

Stanford took a few more seconds to make his entrance, sliding out of the gap Hodgins made. It was clear almost immediately something was wrong. The snake’s spine was twisted at an odd angle. But before anyone could warn Hodgins, the ball python slipped out of the vent and crashed to the table below.

It writhed. It writhed in sections, because its body had been chopped into chunks, and the only thing keeping it together was the shoestring of its spine. With no connected muscles to really move, it flipped over, and rolled off the table faster than anyone could react. Stanford left a smear of blood and half-digested food wherever it touched.

“Christ, what is that thing?!” Cam cried.

It twitched and writhed, too lively to be a dying snake. Its jaws snapped in the air. Where it sensed movement, it lashed out, quicker than even a whole python. Everyone stood at the edges of the room. When Hodgins jumped down, it launched itself at him, like a spring. An unnatural hissing filled autopsy room 1.

“Tongs—tongs, a bag, hurry—” Hodgins reached for anything he could use to grab it, knocking beakers and instruments off tables. Stanford crawled after him—moving segment by segment, like a centipede. Bits of shredded intestine oozed out of it.

Slowly, so slowly, Bones reached down and took off one shoe. This wasn’t a normal snake. But it started out as one. And the anatomy of snakes’ teeth meant when they bit down, they couldn’t let go. Bones took the longest forceps she could reach and slid her shoe towards the snake.

It turned its head. Fixed the motion with one unblinking eye. Then—

 _Snap_.

It latched its hundred needle-teeth into Bones’ shoe. In strange, twisted shapes, it wound itself around the shoe, spine crackling as it went.

“Kill it!” Angela cried.

“How? It’s already dead!” Hodgins cried back.

Bones held Stanford just behind the head with the forceps. It tightened so hard the leather of her shoe creaked. Still, the snake managed to make unnatural hissing sounds, even as it wrenched its teeth free.

“Booth, a chair! Over here!” Bones said (a little blood dribbling from her mouth).

With a good deal of shouting, gesturing, and panic, Booth lined up the leg of a lab stool with the snake’s head. In an instant he slammed the stool down and it was done. The thing’s brain was crushed. It stopped moving, but didn’t let go—Bones and Hodgins carefully pried it off with what tools they had on hand. The body was easy. The teeth still embedded in the leather were hard.

While Bones slipped her shoe back on (snake goo be damned), Hodgins put Stanford in an evidence bag with shaking hands. The look on his face was half horror and half heartbreak. He’d loved that snake. He really had.

It flailed in the bag. Hodgins dropped it on a table and backed away.

“Alright, screw this. We’re getting out.” Booth said.

***

There wasn’t much in the way of weapons in the autopsy room. Cam had her scalpel, and Bones clung tight to a pair of sharp-ended scissors. The lab outside the wall of glass was still. Deceptively still. Figures stood watching, not breathing, blending into the shadows of machines. Noise outside had quieted to just the storm lashing the building. The white noise would be soothing, in other circumstances. When Booth and Sweets moved the lab table away from the door, the sound was jarring in the semi-silence.

“I want you guys to promise me something.” Booth said, hands on the door handle, ready to go. “No matter what happens, don’t stop. One of us needs to get out, get the children, and warn the F.B.I. Got it?”

“That’s dark, man.” Hodgins said, clutching his little mallet (for chiseling into bone).

“It’s what needs to happen. I’ll be right behind you. Ready?”

The door opening was almost anticlimactic. Booth expected it to be locked—but the whole world had gone topsy-turvy, nothing in the Jeffersonian worked like it was supposed to. The whole thing screamed ‘trap’ to Booth. But as Cam informed them, the front door was their best shot. Booth just held tight to the pipe he’d unscrewed from a standing light. He was sorely missing his gun—but in a pinch, the pipe could crush some skulls.

Thunder rumbled high above the building. The alarms had turned themselves off, and the rotating lights had frozen in their domes. What little moonlight was shining through the glass ceiling wavered with the rain. That crane still towered high above, blinking red stars lining its shape. Nothing stirred.

Nothing living, anyway.

There was a strange sound, just barely audible over the storm. It was like…a rasping, as they got closer to the exam rooms and the exit. With a clap of thunder, the skies quieted for a moment and the noise came into sharp relief. The backlit walls of bones in drawers—those walls in the exam rooms that went up and up forever—were rattling in place. The stored bones scraped and tapped against one another. Just ceaselessly rattled. It was a dry, eerie sound. But not quite a threat.

Hodgins’ lab passed, with its cages ripped open, bugs scattered dead on the floor. The door still stood a little open. Hodgins dully reminded himself to fix that door later (it didn’t shut like it should and he’d been meaning to fix it for months). He kept hold of his wife’s hand and watched Bones.

The forensic anthropologist trained the point of her scissors on the shadows underneath the platform and didn’t dare look away. (Was that a flicker? The corner of a white sheet, disappearing behind a support column?) She seemed to know something they didn’t. No one wanted to find out what that was.

The thing under the white sheet didn’t make an appearance yet. Someone else did.

Booth never heard the figure step out from Hodgins’ office. He didn’t even realize Micah was no longer on the platform. He just saw a flash of white shirt out of the corner of his eye and turned to see the security guard. Booth kept his head—but the gasp he let out alerted everyone else.

For a beat, Booth expected Bones to speak up. He was almost waiting for it. At any second she was going to speak up, give him a rational explanation for why the corpse was standing there, just staring with those dead brown eyes…

Instead, he heard Bones shout, “Run!”

There was the sound of shoes on the concrete floor—the sound of the others taking off—but Booth wasn’t fast enough. He wasn’t even fast enough to turn and see who got away. Something that felt like a sledgehammer came at a diagonal and slammed him up against the bulletproof glass wall. His head bounced with a sound that would’ve been comical, in any other circumstance. Now, Booth had been slammed before. Hell, he’d even been shot before, almost in the same spot. This felt different—the pain didn’t go away when the wave of adrenaline washed over Booth.

He heard something by his feet. The pipe. He’d dropped it, and it clattered for a long time on the floor, almost lost in the sound of the sirens that had blared to life. Booth looked down and saw Micah’s hand, pressing him into the wall so hard he couldn’t draw a breath. When he kicked at the security guard, he felt flesh give, but still Micah stood like a statue.

Suddenly Bones was on Micah, a furious blur; her scissors were stabbed (open) into Micah’s arm and Bones wrenched them shut. Booth felt tendons pop but the pressure on his chest didn’t move. Micah’s face never changed. It was still slack, neutral, with drool shining on his chin in the flashing lights.

Bones got a better angle, pushing off the wall to wrench the scissors more. Micah’s ulna and radius creaked. With enough force, Bones knew, she could break them. Right beside her, her husband was suffocating. He was suffocating—

Something cracked against Micah’s shoulder—the pipe, neither of them saw it coming—and the pressure on Booth’s chest lifted enough for him to take a breath. He got enough leverage to kick Micah in the gut and shift sideways out of the trap.

Booth found that his lungs were still stinging. His legs wouldn’t quite hold him, and he sank down against the wall, with Bones trying to pull him to his feet. She was shouting something, but Booth couldn’t hear it over the sound of the world ending.

Another suit was there—Sweets, holding the pipe like a sword, looking really unsure of what to do next. He was trained for the field by the F.B.I., but this was _not_ the field, and _none of this_ was in the manual. (He’d make a complaint about that the next time he was in the office.) Micah swung at him, but Sweets ducked. He’d been swung at since elementary school—he knew how to deal with that.

Like rigor mortis was setting in, Micah had seconds of intense, fast movement—then he’d almost get stuck. From her place by Booth, Bones watched this pattern. Patterns, she understood. Micah reeled back to go for Sweets’ throat, and Bones dodged in low, going for something on Micah’s belt. In one jerky movement (punctuated by a few joints cracking) Micah turned to look at her.

Suddenly, the pipe was wrenched out of Sweets’ hands. Booth had grabbed it. When he swung it at Micah’s head, it connected with killing force.

The sound of a skull caving in was more like…a gourd being split. One loud sound made of many little wet, muffled cracks. Micah went down—if only for the force of Booth’s swing—clutching a few strands of Bones’ hair.

Booth dropped the pipe. It was bent nearly in half, the cheap, hollow thing. Apparently IKEA didn’t make ‘em for combat use. Bones and Sweets grabbed Booth as he sagged, pulling him away from Micah, towards the exit.

“What happened to ‘don’t stop’?!” Booth wheezed.

Slipping Micah’s gun into Booth’s holster, Bones replied, “I’m your wife! Not your subordinate!”

“What about you?!” Booth turned on Sweets (who was supposed to be his subordinate).

“I’m a psychologist!” Sweets managed to string together three words, despite the shock he was in.

No one had left him behind. Cam was waiting just a few yards away, urging them to hurry up.

“Go, go, we’re almost there!” Cam shouted over the storm shaking the Jeffersonian.

She dropped behind to bring up the back of the pack. Bones didn’t realize in time that she’d gotten too close to the platform. And Cam didn’t realize in time that something had wrapped around her ankle. One step, she was fine. The exit was _right there_. The next step, she went down, _hard_ —just barely getting the scalpel out to the side so she wouldn’t land on it. She didn’t just trip over some stray cable, left out by an intern. Something had her. And it was pulling her under the platform.

Cam fought—those years as a cop in New York coming back to her all at once—but whatever had her was thin and unnaturally strong. Like a steel wire wrapped around her ankle, hidden under a sterile white sheet.

There were other hands on her. Hodgins, Angela, she realized just in time to keep herself from stabbing them. Between the three of them they barely counteracted the pull of the thing under the white sheet. Cam still felt her knee pop. She placed her free foot on a steel platform support, reaching down to slash madly at the thing with her scalpel. She cut holes in the sheet, but the thing didn’t even flinch.

One hole fell open and Cam found herself looking into the eye-socket of their Valley of Fire mummy, still crawling with a spider. Cam was frozen. They might’ve stayed like that forever, equally matched, if Angela hadn’t made a decision,.

“Fuck this!” Angela screamed to the universe. She dove for the mallet, still laying where Hodgins had dropped it, and started swinging at the white sheet near Cam’s ankle. Wordless screams tore out of her throat.

It took a few tries (one glancing off Cam’s ankle, sending pain like electricity up her leg) but the thing shattered. Suddenly the force pulling Cam under the platform was gone. She yanked back and a skeletal hand came with her, clutching her boot with crumbling fingers. It was more dust and shards than hand by that point. Cam kicked at it, and most of it came off.

Stumbling, limping, Cam climbed to her feet. The rest of the group wasn’t far off. With Hodgins’ fearful grip on her arm, they rejoined the rest.

The antechamber. It was only a few yards away from where Cam had fallen. They made it there, crowding through the broken glass of the first doors. Hodgins and Booth were first to take a crack at prying the doors open. That didn’t work—of course it didn’t work—so Booth, almost staggering, motioned for Hodgins to give him room. Booth grabbed the fire extinguisher. It had worked once before.

Angela stood outside, hammer raised. She shouted (almost incomprehensibly) for them to come on, try her again. Angela could take a lot. Her job at the Jeffersonian put her through a lot. But she was about done with this nightmare, and ready to go see her son. She (and Cam, holding her scalpel up) scanned for the corpses that had just attacked them.

Lightning lit up the room, thunder making the windows quake in their frames. Sirens and the storm screamed so loud no one could think. Micah was gone from the place he lay. Of course he was. Cam spotted him by the right-hand corner of the forensics platform, just watching them between the bars.

That thing in the white sheet skittered out from under the platform. It never stood up, just moved like a spider, a mass of angles and glimpses of bone. And it didn’t attack, either. It was more…circling. It wasn’t in any hurry to close in on them. Almost like it knew they weren’t going anywhere.

Angela was the one to spot the last corpse. Their Russian spy, with flesh reduced to jelly barely clinging to its bones. Oh, it liked to hang out in the hallway to Angela’s left, where the light didn’t quite reach. This time, it came out. It moved in a loose way. The bowl of its pelvis barely held what was left of its digestive organs. And it didn’t attack, either. Just joined the white sheet and Micah in watching them with dead eyes.

Booth’s first strike caused a spiderweb of cracks to cover a fourth of their exit door. On the second strike, he thought he felt the glass give a little. So Booth kept going. And going.

Something was wrong. The glass wasn’t caving like it should’ve…His muscles burned and forced him to stop. It was like he couldn’t draw a full breath. Then (out of the corner of his eye) he saw something odd.

The cracks were disappearing. Healing themselves from the outside in.

It must’ve been a fluke of the light. With more and more desperation, Booth slammed the fire extinguisher into the door. They were so close. Safety was just on the other side, he could _see_ it, they were _SO CLOSE_ —

“She won’t let us leave.” Hodgins said, so quietly only he could hear.

Behind them, the sirens screamed. It was like the building rang with them. Rain lashed the roof, warping the light even further. Everything moved. Even the shadows. Of the six people left alive in the Jeffersonian, five of them were struggling to get out, standing at the ready for their attackers, trying to leverage the door off its tracks, did anything they could to stay alive. Lance Sweets stood still in place…and ran through lists in his head.

1650-1700. Lowland Massachusetts. She had to be…

Margaret Scott, Sarah Wildes, Mary and Alice Parker. They fit. They fit the victim profile…But they all had known graves. Their victim had her body destroyed, buried deep hundreds of miles away, and all trace of her end was stricken from the records. A young woman lost to history in the middle of the Salem Witch Trials.

Of those, there was only one.

Sweets was moving before he could even think of what he was doing. His feet carried him out past Angela and Cam. Angela latched onto his jacket, but he didn’t need to go far. He just needed to get where she could hear him.

“Mersye? Mersye…Sears?”

The lights paused mid-flash and the alarms held, one long fading tone that petered out into silence. Blessed silence. The corpses stood where they were. The storm still raged, white noise all around them, but it worked.

It _worked_.

Sweets looked back at his friends (mostly astonished he hadn’t died). They basked in the silence.

“What did you do?” Cam whispered.

“I just called her name...” Sweets said back.

Angela still had that grip on the back of his jacket. She came to join him, almost scared to move, not wanting to break the silent spell.

“Keep going…Keep going, Sweets, talk to her.” Angela said.

Sweets looked back at Booth. The older agent mouthed something. ‘Stop her.’

It had been a while since Sweets had pored over the court documents, but he could recite them in his sleep. Clearing his throat, he settled on one, and tried to speak with authority.

“The Jurors present that Mersye Sears, unmarried woman, in the county of Essex as of the twenty-fifth day of May, certain detestable arts called witchcrafts hath wickedly and feloniously used...”

Sweets got through the first sentence of her indictment, and the eerie silence stayed. The lights blinked once. Twice. Something was in front of him—but it was gone so fast he was never sure it was there at all.

It wasn’t so much a feeling of being stabbed. The instrument that pierced him was so well-designed it felt more like…something inside him twisted. It didn’t even hurt, at first. Sweets just looked down with the same concern he’d given bug bites, lifted his tucked white shirt, and muttered “Oh.”

Without thinking, he turned back to the group, and walked towards what he thought was safety. There was a stain blooming on his shirt. Red poured in streaks down his side, soaking into his waistband. When he stumbled, hands were there to catch him. Then the world exploded back into noise and motion.

It wasn’t just the sirens. The intercom clicked on, and a snippet of that song played, louder than everything else. It was insanity. But like a radio switching stations, it quickly cut out, replaced by a young woman’s enraged screams. The storm still raged, yes. But in the distance there was a creaking. Not the building. Something else.

Bones (hand pressed over the gaping wound in Sweets’ side) looked up. She was the only one to see the crane above the Jeffersonian sway in hurricane winds. A thought, feeling like insanity, struck her.

‘It’s going to fall. It’s going to fall right on top of us.’

Like a dream, she watched as it—still blinking—come down. In a noise louder than the end of the world, it brought the Jeffersonian’s ceiling with it.


	3. Stage 3

The door to Autopsy Room 01 shot open, banging against the wall as four people spilled in. Sweets was more dumped than placed on the floor, coming to rest with his back against a cabinet, shaky and pale but still alive. Angela went with him. While Cam tore through their first aid kit for anything that could help, Angela kept pressure on the stab wound, while Booth slammed and locked the door.

“Hodgins—and Bones—where are they? Where’d we lose ‘em?” Booth asked. His voice came out in a wheeze, barely audible over the storm and the sirens.

“They were right behind us!” Angela looked over her shoulder, searching the lab behind the glass wall for any sign of them. No use—what she could see was dark and chaotic, lashed by rain and showers of sparks. Booth stood with his weight against the door and searched too.

The Jeffersonian’s ceiling had lowered by about six feet. The walls buckled, but held; when the crane landed right on top of the glass ceiling, it all shattered at once, falling in a sheet of glass and water. Lights flashed and rain fell into the lab. With every gust, the building creaked like it was going to give way. The autopsy room was safer. But not totally safe.

Jane Doe—Mersye Sears—lay on the autopsy table behind them, one hand and one foot hanging off the edge. They didn’t leave her this way, but no one noticed. They had far bigger problems.

“I don’t see ‘em.” Booth shifted to get a different angle, trying to look down the hallway they’d come from. “I don’t see ‘em—I’m going to go get—”

“Seeley, do _not_ leave this room.” Cam commanded (even though her voice was shaking). With a dull jolt of pain from her bad ankle, Cam knelt and pried Angela’s hands off of Sweets. The damage under his shirt wasn’t a knife wound, like she’d expected. More like a hole. Too small to be a bullet hole. It ran deep (probably punctured his liver) and bled freely. Cam wasn’t a medical doctor, but she’d had to do first aid on suspects and junkies and cops in the back of her patrol car. She could keep him alive long enough to get him to a hospital.

“I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.” Sweets said, more to himself than anyone else. “Bones was right with me, she…”

“I’ll go get them. Stay here. Lock the door.” Booth said.

He took a deep breath (chest smarting) and psyched himself up. The gun in his holster was an unfamiliar model, but it’d do. Its weight felt comforting in his hand…He blinked, and suddenly there was motion, right outside—figures coming in fast. The F.B.I. agent braced himself against the door. But the figure that slammed itself against the glass and shouted at him to open it was Hodgins (eyes wild and hair wilder). Bones was right behind him. Booth already had the door unlocked. All he had to do was throw it open and pull them in.

“Jesus, dude, I’m so glad you didn’t shoot us—” Hodgins panted.

“What happened to you?! Why’d you fall behind?!” Booth asked over the blaring sirens.

“Hodgins had an idea.” Bones said, sounding about as happy as Booth.

Bones jammed the thing she’d been carrying—the push-bar to a shattered glass door, dripping with gore like she’d used it on a corpse—between the autopsy room door and a fixed table. She and Booth re-barricaded the door. When Booth turned to Hodgins for an explanation, Hodgins just opened his hand to show him the thing Hodgins had been clutching like a rosary. It was a tiny bottle. Some sort of medicine.

“It was in my office.” Hodgins said, like that was an explanation. He frantically searched for a syringe. Cam kept her autopsy room organized. Even in the chaos, it didn’t take Hodgins long to find one. He stood behind the body of Mersye Sears and drew out a massive dose from the bottle, jamming the needle right into her heart.

The others were shouting, but Hodgins could barely hear them. He dropped the needle with a clatter by Mersye and reached into her chest cavity. Open-heart C.P.R. didn’t look so hard in the movies. It took a second for Hodgins to get a rhythm, but eventually, he got it (he thought).

Were the sirens quieting? Hodgins couldn’t quite tell. That song was back on the intercom, sounding like some American military torture method. Another few seconds passed and Hodgins swore the alarms were quieting.

“Tie this. Here.” Cam told Angela. Hands replaced hers, keeping bandages tight over Sweets’ wound. Cam was free to sidle up beside Hodgins.

It took a second for her to put the pieces together. When she did, she reached into Mersye Sears’ chest, telling Hodgins to move. He was doing it wrong. Cam wasn’t a heart surgeon, either, but she’d been engaged to one, and she had better heart massage technique than the forensic entomologist.

Blood (looking terribly fresh) seeped from the body. It started flowing into her thoracic cavity, getting into Cam’s gloves, but she kept going. She circulated the drugs in Mersye Sears’ system, and bit by bit, the sirens faded. The song slowed. Even the lights seemed to slow their flickering.

Cam didn’t know how long she was at it. By the time she felt Bones touch her shoulder, the lab was silent (except for the rain), and Cam’s hands were cramping. Cautiously, she let go of Mersye Sears’ heart.

Mersye’s chest muscles relaxed. Her lungs deflated, and a sound like a sigh escaped her lips. Her eyes stared, unfocused, at the ceiling. Was it just a trick of the light, or did she seem more peaceful?

“What was that? What did you inject her with?” Booth asked.

“Ketamine.” Hodgins answered, changing his gloves. (If there was a zombie plague, he didn’t want to spread it.)

“ _Why_ …do you have _ketamine_ …in your _office_?” Cam asked gently. Angela (sitting beside Sweets) looked like she was about to burst with questions, all of them very loud.

“Because when some police dog ate a guy’s face, or you need to get evidence out of some horse, I’m the guy you send it to!” Hodgins said back. He was just realizing how loud his voice was in this newfound quiet.

“Why did it stop the…?” Booth asked cautiously, pointing up at the ceiling.

“…I have a theory.”

With clean hands, Hodgins went looking through the autopsy room. It had to be there. It was experimental, sure, but it still had to be stored there, Cam can’t have thrown it away…

At long last, Hodgins came back to the autopsy table, wheeling a machine that looked like a portable E.K.G. He looked proud (if a little bit off his rocker). Cam knew what he was doing and had to sigh. She’d allow it—but only because his last idea worked. It would take a second to set up. At least the craziness outside had calmed down.

Stripping off her gloves and cleaning her hands, she took stock of the mess they’d made on her autopsy table. Cam removed the discarded syringe from a rivulet of blood. Tracing its pattern up, she noticed the puncture mark from when she took liver temp, at the beginning of the autopsy. The probe she’d used hadn’t moved from the ‘used’ tray. The shape and placing looked familiar. Gesturing Bones over, Cam proposed something crazy.

“What are you two thinking?” Angela asked, almost afraid to know.

Bones (lacking all tact) held up the liver temp probe. It looked like a skewer, rusty with drying blood. “We think someone took Sweets’ liver temperature, with something like this.” She said.

Sweets paled even further when he caught sight of the probe. He let his head fall back against the cabinet with a dull _thud_ , answering, “Yeah. That looks about right.”

“There’s no hole in his shirt.” Angela reached over to mess with his button-down, replacing it over the bandages. (She didn’t even care about the blood anymore. Angela had reached her limit with the amount of weirdness, blood, and violence—she’d looped back around to feeling normal.)

“Oh, good. I love this shirt. It’s my favorite.” Sweets said, forgetting about the large bloodstain.

Setting himself up beside the table, Hodgins turned on the machine. He’d fitted the leads (red and black wires coming out of the main box) with new needles. Everything was good to go. For the sake of visibility, he placed the corpse’s left arm over her open stomach. Her skin looked so pale against the muted blues and reds of her organs. Even Sweets watched this display.

“ _This_ measures nerve conductivity in fresh cadavers.” Hodgins explained. “The theory was, the fresher a body is, the better its nerves will conduct signals. We thought it’d help narrow down time of death to the hour. Maybe even the minute. Needle A puts out a small, steady current. Needle B picks up and measures what the nerve conducted.”

With the precision and care of an acupuncturist, Hodgins placed Needle B at the distal end of Mersye’s ulnar nerve. The machine immediately went off with a series of soft beeps. Cam and Bones monitored (even though Bones had no idea what the readouts meant).

“…And?” Booth asked, taking a seat on a table.

Cam answered. “Readings are still consistent with a very, very fresh corpse. But this thing isn’t an industry standard yet, it’s still in the experimental phases. We don’t have numbers to compare these to…”

“Just wait. Just wait for the magic trick.” Hodgins said.

With hands where everyone could see ‘em (to show everyone he wasn’t interfering with the results), Hodgins removed needle A. The results on the machine dipped, but Needle B was still registering electrical signals. Mersye’s arm twitched.

“What…does this mean?” Bones asked.

“Her nerves are still sending electrical signals. Electrical signals of their _own_.” Hodgins said.

“This could be normal for a body. The brain still fires off electrical signals after death, Dr. Hodgins, we’ve seen this.” Cam replied.

“Electrical signals like _this_? _This_ strong?”

“We don’t know yet! We don’t have the data!”

In response, Hodgins just took the needle from Mersye’s arm. He discarded that one in a built-in sharps box, putting a fresh needle on the lead and uncapping it. Hodgins fixed Cam with a look.

“Jack, don’t.” Angela told him. She knew it was futile—that look on Hodgins’ face told her so. Angela just closed her eyes.

Hodgins stuck the needle in his own arm. He winced as his hand twitched (hitting the ulnar nerve didn’t feel great). Beside him, the machine picked back up its regular beeping. When he moved to show Cam, the results were closer to the ones he’d gotten from the body. Cam backed up to sit on a lab stool without a word.

“What does that mean? What does any of this mean?” Bones was on the edge of begging.

“It means…” Hodgins took the needle from his arm, got a fresh one, and replaced it in Mersye’s arm. “…Her brain is still sending signals to the rest of her body. And I think she’s trying to move her arm away from me.”

“…She’s still alive.” Bones said. Not a question. A statement.

Hodgins’ voice took on a husky tone as he bent over the body to manipulate the needle. “Alive…feeling…trying to escape the pain.”

“You can’t be serious…Bones, you’re accepting this awful quick.” Booth said with disbelief in his voice.

“My mistake, before, was changing the evidence to fit a plausible story. We should always fit the story to the evidence. Evidence doesn’t lie, Booth…what we saw out there wasn’t a lie.” Bones admitted.

Booth wished he had something to fire back at her. Anything at all. But there was nothing. The evidence doesn’t lie.

A thick, dreaded silence fell over the room. Sweets couldn’t take his eyes off Mersye Sears’ face. She stared, slack-jawed, up at the ceiling. Just a little more relaxed with the ketamine in her system. She recognized her name. She was _alive_.

Thinking better of it, Hodgins removed the needle and sat back. Her body was…ruined. He was sure if he placed Needle B in one of the returning nerves connected to her torso, the machine would light up like the fourth of July. Every nerve must’ve been screaming. His mind wandered back to the screams from the speakers, intercut with that insane song.

“Hodgins, she can’t be alive. Not after all the time we’ve had her. Look at…at her heart. It isn’t beating.” Cam said, her voice barely above a whisper.

Hodgins didn’t have an explanation for her. Not even a crazy one. What she’d just read on the nerve conduction machine spoke for itself. He just calmly got up, tucked the leads back in the cart, and went to sit by his wife. (Angela took his hand and stroked the spot where he’d stuck the needle, in an unconscious comforting gesture.) All Cam could do was sit in horrified silence, looking at the guts of a girl she’d cut open.

Reality sank in: there was no cause of death because Mersye Sears was still alive. She stayed that way for centuries in the dirt. More than that, she was alive through everything they did to her. She didn’t move under the eyes of the group. She just lay there, open, disemboweled like an animal being slaughtered. She felt it…She was still feeling it.

“What do we do now?” Bones asked. For all her genius, she was at a loss.

“She can still hear us. Hearing’s the last thing to go.” Booth spoke from experience.

“She heard us…she warned us…” Sweets said, mouth dry like cotton. “Every step of the way. Mersye tried to warn us not to cut into her, but we didn’t listen.”

Four hundred years old, and still alive. Hodgins tried to steady his breathing. A panic attack was coming, and fast. He’d only spent a few hours under the dirt. She’d spent centuries, not able to breathe or scream…

“She’s got to be insane.” Hodgins said, voice cracking.

Sweat standing out on his forehead, looking a little delirious, Sweets turned to look at him. “People have come back from insane. I’ve seen it.” He spoke from experience.

“ _Insane_ or _not_ , _warning_ or _no warning_ , she just killed Micah. She tried to kill _us_.” Booth said. His hands (even the one bruised by his attempts to punch through the glass) were twisting into fists, clenching and unclenching. Sweets recognized this as a sign he was on the edge. “We’ve got to end this, or eventually, she’ll get her way. Her brain’s still alive, isn’t it? The last part of her still alive? I bet if we destroy it, it’ll stop her.”

Angela waited a beat (looking between Mersye’s face and Booth’s). She spoke up, her voice the steadiest in the room. “You can’t be serious. She’s just a teenager, Booth, look at her.”

“It’ll put her out of her misery. She won’t feel a thing.” Booth stood up and un-holstered Micah’s gun. There were enough bullets left to splatter the corpse’s brain.

“You don’t know that—”

“If we want to get out of here—if we want to see our _kids_ again, Angela, keep them safe from her—this is our best chance.” Booth said. He half-expected someone to grab him as he made his way across the room to stand at Mersye’s head…but they knew better than to stop a man with a gun on a mission.

Booth knew he had to work fast. The lights above him were flickering. He wasn’t worried about the others in the room as much as he was worried about Mersye. She didn’t seem to know how these guns worked—or she would’ve had Micah shoot them all—but she knew something was about to happen. And she could bring down the whole building on top of them. The storm made the building groan, and people were shouting as he lined up the shot.

“You can’t just—”

“Stop it, she’ll—”

It was his wife’s soft voice that finally made Booth look up.

“Booth…when I was 16, my foster father tried to hit me.”

As Bones struggled to talk past the knot in her throat, the room fell quiet. Bones looked down at her hands as she told the room something she’d never spoken about before.

“I say…’tried’, like he hadn’t done it dozens of times. This time was different. He was an older man, but he was surprisingly fast. And this time I knew he wanted to…this time was going to be worse. He took off his belt to whip me, like he’d done before, but that time I grabbed it as it came down. I hit him back. But it was the wrong end of the belt, and it hurt him. Badly. That’s why I was…blacklisted, as the other kids said. Moved from a 2 to a 4.”

In the silence that followed, Sweets spoke up quietly. “Dr. Brennan, you weren’t a bad kid.”

“No, I know that! I know that _now_. I wasn’t a bad kid, and I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just wanted him to _stop_.”

Booth hadn’t taken his eyes off Bones. He nodded, appreciating the strength it took her to speak up. His heart was breaking for her, it really was. But he didn’t take the gun away.

“You weren’t a bad kid.” Booth agreed. “But this is something different. This is something unholy. And if we don’t stop her, she’ll kill us off one…by one.”

“Booth, you can’t go off on your own and just—just end her without any—” Sweets tried to protest.

“Look away. That’s an order.”

“No! Look at her face! She’s alive in there!” Angela cried.

“This is what I do, all right?! This is what I do! I take the shot, and I live with it, so my family stays safe! You’ve done your jobs! Let me do mine!” Booth shouted over the growing storm.

As wind lashed the Jeffersonian, voices overlapped, growing louder and louder. Booth fell silent and tightened his finger on the trigger. Bones’ hand wrapped around his wrist (not fighting him, not yet) and the lights blinked. Outside, in the lab, figures stood by the glass wall. Mersye Sears stared at the ceiling. She’d never feel the bullet coming. It’d be over in just a second.

“Hey. HEY!”

Another voice cut through the chaos. Cam’s. Her voice had a quality that made her impossible to ignore. While the lights still flickered and the storm still roared, everyone fell quiet and looked at Dr. Saroyan.

“Put it down, Seeley.” Cam ordered.

“No. This is my job, Cam.”

“And this is my lab. Put it down.”

Slowly, with hands shaking almost imperceptibly, Booth took his finger off the trigger. His grip loosened and Bones took the gun from him. Booth heard her set it down somewhere deeper in the room as he gripped the edge of the autopsy table and leaned over it. That tightness in his chest was slowly dissipating. He tried not to look at Mersye’s face, as always, but from this angle he couldn’t help looking at her. She looked like a hundred other girls he’d spent his career trying to save. She looked like Christine, if she was ten years older.

“Here’s what we’re going to do.” Cam said, a steady voice of reason at the end of the world. “Dr. Brennan, Dr. Hodgins, you’re with me again. Angela? Can you assist if we need you?”

Confused, Angela just nodded.

“Good. Booth, do what you can to keep us safe while we work. Dr. Sweets, translate, if you can.”

“Translate _what_?” Sweets asked.

“We’re going to reverse what we’ve done. We’re going to sew her back up like a living patient, and she needs to know why we’re doing what we’re doing.” Cam was already moving around the autopsy room, gathering what they’d need. It was half autopsy tools, half supplies from the first-aid kit.

“Wait, wait, wait. This isn’t what we do. This is the _opposite_ of what we do!” Hodgins said, unable to keep the edge of a laugh out of his voice.

“Today, this is what we do.”

With an excited look at his wife (this was going to be a wild new experience), Hodgins climbed to his feet. Angela muttered an “oh boy” to herself. Bones, of course, was ready to go, and both doctors joined Cam in her mission to save the Jane Doe on the autopsy table.

***

“There. Cardiac massage please, doctor.” Hodgins said, getting the second syringe out of the way as Cam’s hands dove in.

“For the record, how many mils was that?” Bones asked. Good science required they record every detail.

“A ton.” Hodgins answered. Bones gave up.

“That should buy her a little more time…I just hope she can still hear us.” Cam said. She watched the readings on the nerve conduction machine (Needle B plugged into a returning nerve on her shoulder) change. She hoped that was a good sign, that the girl wasn’t in as much pain. There was no way to be certain. They’d just have to work quick.

With one hand over his stab wound, Sweets stood up. (It took an embarrassingly long time, with a little bit of groaning.) He waved off Booth’s assistance and made his way to the autopsy table.

“Can I take just a second to talk to her?” the psychologist asked.

“Go ahead.” Cam said.

“…We come to you with humility in our hearts, Mersye. You are innocent of a witch, and we hope you find us innocent of the affliction done to your body. In the next few moments we will set you right, and then no more harm will come to you.” It was awkward language, but Sweets hoped Mersye would understand.

“Can I…?” Bones asked, quiet and awkward.

“Oh, yeah, please—just maybe, use simple language? Language she can understand?” Sweets lowered his voice to a whisper. “And don’t tell her we’re doctors. That won’t go over well.”

Bones nodded, looked down at the flayed girl, and tried to sum up what she was thinking. She put the thing she’d found in her preparations—her own molar in an evidence dish—beside Mersye Sears’ head.

“You can have this. Your body functions in ways modern science can’t yet comprehend, and to re-implant it in my mouth, at this point, is also a scientific impossibility…You’re not a bad child. And you do not need to fight anymore.”

Sweets was a little impressed. Bones had started out like he’d expected, but she’d saved it at the last second. Suddenly, eyes were on Cam. Bones was done speaking and it was her turn.

“I…don’t know what to say.” Cam admitted.

“Just…if you’re gonna…talk to _her_.” Sweets advised. He shifted his weight off the table and limped away, giving them space to work.

The girl looked up at Cam. Mersye Sears, 400-year-old witch. Cam could give a damn dissertation on her—the things that happened to her, the forensic evidence they’d found that night, both possible and impossible—but when she had to think of something to say to Mersye herself, everything felt flat. Sorry? You’re going to be okay? We’re the best hands in the Jeffersonian? Nothing felt right.

Cam just let out a breath, put her instruments down, and forgot everyone else was in the room. It was just her and Mersye Sears as the forensic pathologist started talking.

“My name is…Camille. Camille Saroyan. And I want you to understand…what we did…we did to find out who hurt you, and stop them from hurting any other girl. We…never imagined you could still be alive in there. And we’re so, _so_ sorry…I have a daughter your age. Her name is Michelle. If what happened to you happened to her, I’d unleash hell on them, and not stop till they were dead. I understand you want to hurt us. But if you let us, we’re going to try and undo what we’ve done.”

Cam poised her instruments over the broken body. The lights flickered, but nothing attacked. She turned to the others, waiting for her orders.

“Ready?” Cam asked.

It was actually Booth that came to them next, with his head bowed and his heart in his hands.

“Do you think she’d mind if I…prayed for her?” Booth asked softly.

Cam watched the lights. No reaction. It’d be understandable if she refused—the Christian church had twisted her, made her a monster in their image—but if Mersye could hear she didn’t object. Holding a fragile hope, Booth took his place by Mersye’s head, bent over to pray with her like he was giving last rites.

“Hey, Booth? Maybe none of that Latin stuff. She was Protestant.” Sweets said.

Booth nodded. He started with the traditional ‘our father’, stroking Mersye’s hair back like he did to relax Christine. Everything was set. Cam dove into Mersye’s open mouth, forcing the donated molar 32 into place with a pair of forceps and a grotesque squishing sound.

“Start by arranging her intestines. No twists…” Cam took off instructing, guiding every move. Her assistants were used to taking bodies apart. They hardly knew how they would fit back together.

In the little corner they’d presumed was safe, Angela bowed her head, too. She was muttering but Sweets didn’t recognize any specific prayer.

“Who are you praying to?” Sweets asked softly. Normally, he wouldn’t interrupt, but this may be the last chance they got to talk.

“I think…to the universe. But mostly, to her.” Angela said. They both looked at Mersye Sears.

“What are you praying for?”

“Peace.”

Angela went back to it, and the people at the autopsy table worked at a feverish pace. They lined up organs, tendons, ligaments, and arteries. Cam held a curved needle over a severed vein and took a deep breath. This wasn’t going to be easy.

She dipped the needle in, and the world exploded into sound and motion.

The nerve conduction machine started a rapid beeping and the alarms blared to life. Flashing lights from the lab outside painted Mersye’s body in shifting reds. The building creaked above them. While Mersye didn’t move, Cam knew she was feeling it. It took every ounce of her willpower to keep stabbing and pulling the needle.

Screams tore out of the intercom, quickly cutting to that insane song.

_Just open up your heart and let the sun shine in…_

“What happened to sedation?!” Cam shouted over the cacophony.

“She’s metabolizing it fast!” Hodgins said, diving for the ketamine and syringe.

Sewing up an artery is difficult under the best conditions—like trying to sew two halves of a spaghetti noodle together. This surgery came with the threat of death looming over their heads and screaming in their ears. The tools they had to use weren’t fit for the job. Autopsy didn’t require delicate stitching or clean-edged cuts. Still, under the light, and with no experience, they did their best. Bones carefully reattached the visceral peritoneum while Cam did the pericardial sac.

 _Bang_.

Angela let out a few curse words and Sweets re-opened his wound pulling her back. They barely caught sight of the figure under the white sheet, crawling back into the shadows of the hallway. Shards from its shattered left hand stump were left in the door where it struck. And it wasn’t the only one standing guard over Autopsy Room 01.

“Sedation!” Cam commanded.

“That’s all of it!” Hodgins threw the bottle onto the ‘used’ tray with a clatter.

 _Bang_. The door, made of bulletproof glass, was shattering—white spiderwebs creeping up and up. Angela and Sweets did their best, shoving tables and chairs up against the doorframe.

“Allow your healing hand to touch this child—come on, kid, don’t do this to us, we’re trying to help—” Booth begged the witch.

“Keep working!” Cam said. All she had was a prayer that they’d finish before the corpses got through and her leadership wasn’t going to kill them all.

_Let the sun shine in…face it with a grin._

Forcing the ketamine along Mersye’s bloodstream was only causing her to bleed more, obscuring what they were doing. When Cam stopped her cardiac massage, she found she’d ripped the thin pericardial sac. Damn. They were running out of the five-cord—Cam grabbed the eight-cord and hoped it wouldn’t tear the delicate membrane further. Hodgins grabbed the last five-cord to sew up the superficial artery severed by the liver temp probe.

 _Bang_. The glass of the door gave way, falling inward in a sheet.

“—As it is on Earth. Amen.” Booth (still unable to catch his breath from being caught by a corpse last time) left the table.

With the sound of shattering glass and a wet splat, the liquified corpse dragged itself through the door into the space under a table. Its hands poked through the barricade. The Russian ex-spy ground its silver teeth against the things in its way, bending metal with a horrific groaning sound. If it had eyes, they’d be fixed on Sweets and Angela.

Booth dragged a rolling cabinet from the back of the room, threw it on its side, and shouted at the others to get clear. He pushed it up against the pile just in time to trap the thing. It still clawed at the metal, warping it under skeletal fingers.

Behind the autopsy table, Stanford writhed in its evidence bag.

 _Bang, bang_ —while the white-sheeted figure scrambled, climbing on the frames of the glass wall, Micah swung a chair at another glass pane. This was more strength and endurance than he’d ever shown in life. His movements were mechanical, made jerky by rigor mortis. Micah never took his brown eyes off the room.

Hodgins took this in—saw Booth clutch at his chest, Sweets bleeding through his shirt and Angela way too close to the things trying to break in. He worked fast (vision blurring and panic rising) and tied up one last thread.

“I’ve gotta go! I’ve gotta help!” Hodgins told Cam.

“Go.”

Suddenly there was one more pair of hands to help keep the barricade in place. Hodgins whipped off his lab coat (he’d always hated the uniform anyway), rolled it up, and stuffed it in a gap. Something on the other side immediately tore at it.

 _Bang. Bang._ It took Booth all the strength he had left to upend a table and lean it against the glass Micah was about to break. It wouldn’t be long.

_Smilers never lose…and frowners never win._

“Light—I need light!” Bones said, mopping blood out of her way with crumpled tray-liners.

“Angela! Help!” Cam called. When Angela appeared at her side, Cam set her to work holding a penlight, threading needles when she could. Even when her hands shook and the ceiling threatened to crush them, Angela still did detailed and precise work.

Bones finished re-mooring her intestines and closing the membranes over her abdominal cavity. The sutures were sloppy, but they’d hold. With a curt “Move”, Bones replaced Mersye Sears’ ribcage and sternum over her thoracic cavity, lining up the edges of the shattered bones with Cam’s help.

“We don’t have any rods or pins—” Bones pointed out.

“I know. Just keep the ribs aligned!” Cam shot back, readying a surgical stapler.

It was the widest model with the thinnest gauge they had on hand. Cam always disliked using the stapler, with its _ka-chunk_ sound, firing like a nail gun hard enough to jolt the body. It didn’t get much easier, firing the metal staples into bones, hoping they’d fix the rib-ends in place and not shatter them completely. Cam held the large tool at a precise angle over Mersye’s ribs and fired.

_Ka-chunk._

Another scream tore from the intercoms. This one was accompanied by the sound of shattering glass.

“L2 next—” Cam instructed.

She only put in four, hoping to stabilize Mersye’s ribcage enough to heal on its own. Already, the edges of their sutures were being overgrown with scar tissue. Under her ribcage, fragile tissues started to flutter.

A dull sound like thunder filled the room—Micah, bashing the table with his chair, making it bounce against the window frame with every immense hit. The white-sheeted figure clawed at the glass, pressing itself (stingray-like) to an unbroken pane. It was a terrifying sight under the sheet. It cut streaks into the glass with its broken bone arm, joints crackling, sending up puffs of dust as it moved. Dry flesh fell off it like bark. And the corpse under the table, it was so close to getting in…

Bones pulled the left pectoralis major’s tendon back into place over the sternum. Nearly getting Bones’ fingers, Cam stapled the muscles back into place. _Ka-chunk._ They did the same with the right pectoral and moved on to sew up the transversus abdominus.

_Let the sun shine—_

Skeletal fingers, dripping with putrefaction, reached up from under the table and grabbed the metal. It screamed as it warped.

“Time’s up! Hands out of the way!” Cam yelled, replacing Mersye Sears’ rectus abdominus and stapling her skin shut. Blood started to run again, gumming up the stapler. They were running dangerously low on staples and there wasn’t time to fetch more.

_Ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk—_

The horrible sound echoed even over the storm. Mersye’s flesh rippled where she was struck. The spots started bruising immediately, blood blooming just under the skin.

_Face it with a grin—_

The building above them groaned as wind pushed it to the point of collapsing. Dust fell from the ceiling. Glass started cracking, all across the wall.

“Hurry!” Sweets begged, voice lost in the storm.

 _Ka-chunk._ The last staple went into place. Mersye Sears was whole again.

Everyone took their hands off her, not sure what she would do next. Her chest moved—but faintly. Her eyes still stared, lifeless, up at the ceiling. Cam worked on pure cop instinct when she did what she did next.

“Move!” she called, assistants barely getting out of her way in time.

Above them, the storm roared and the crane pressed the ceiling inward. Stanford writhed.

Cam fetched the emergency defibrillator—a little A.E.D. device, unassuming in the high-tech autopsy room. Its use was simple. Cam set it on the table, took the paper off the stickers on the leads, and stuck them to Mersye Sears’ chest like the pictures on the label instructed. One above her right breast. One below her left. There was a big ‘GO’ button. When Cam pressed it, the little screen (and the little electronic voice) said ‘SENSING’.

“ _Christ_!” Booth yelled, a sound lost in the chaos. The thing under the table had gotten just enough freedom to grab his shirt-sleeve. Putrefaction soaked into the white cuff.

‘SENSING’, the A.E.D. said.

Hodgins grabbed the nearest sharp thing he could find, diving in to cut Booth free. But it wasn’t working fast enough. Back to the table keeping Micah out, Booth used his free hand to grab Micah’s gun. He fired off just one round (loud enough to make glass fall from the window frames) at the corpse before its free hand grabbed the muzzle.

_Maybe if we keep on smiling, he’ll—_

‘TACHYCARDIA SENSED.’ The A.E.D. said.

“Hands off! Back! Back!” Cam commanded.

‘DEFIBRILATING IN 3—’

“Let go! Booth, let it go!” Sweets commanded, working to pull Booth away from the wall and the corpses. Booth dropped the gun, pulled back from the creature so hard his sleeve ripped, and stumbled back to take cover with the others.

‘2—’

The table fell with a dull sound. Micah stood with his way un-blocked. The putrefied corpse burst its way into the room, pulling its torso out of the barricade.

‘1—’

The shock was totally silent. But all three corpses screamed. On the table, Mersye’s eyes squeezed shut.

Her face scrunched up, and she _gasped_ , arching her back off the autopsy table. 

After that sound faded, the world was silent, just on the edge of collapsing. Even lightning seemed to hold still in the sky. It was silent. Mersye Sears took her first breath in almost 400 years.

***

She took another breath. Then another. It was an uphill battle, learning how to breathe again through a throat full of soil. Mersye lifted one hand, grasping again and again at the air. She touched her chest where her staples smoked.

‘TACHYCARDIA RESOLVED. SENSING.’ The A.E.D. said.

Her hand waved aimlessly in the air, ripping the leads off by pulling on their wires. (‘ERROR’, the A.E.D. said.) The corpses at the glass wall didn’t move, not even to help her. Staples tugged as she rolled over. On instinct, she tried to get her legs under her, but they wouldn’t hold…and she hit the floor of Autopsy Room 01.

The Jeffersonian team watched her closely from their hiding places around the room, flinching when she fell. Fear and awe were written on their faces. She was moving. She was breathing. Their Jane Doe was _alive_.

Mersye’s long hair cascaded over her shoulders. It hid her face from the others while she huddled, crumpled in the fetal position on her knees. With numb fingers, she reached out to touch her hair; saw it move in front of her face with her unpracticed breaths. She did that. She moved it of her own accord…Graceless, like a newborn animal, she held onto the autopsy table and climbed to her feet.

This time her legs trembled but did not give. She looked down at them with a hint of surprise on her numbed face—like she never expected to be standing on them again. It was a miracle.

Stiff, like she was still working the rigor mortis out of her muscles, she pushed her weight off the autopsy table, and stood.

Took one unsteady step.

Then another.

Mersye Sears didn’t even look at the Jeffersonian crew. Just at the door. The corpse of the Russian spy had pulled itself back through the barricade and stood with the others just outside the glass wall. Mersye didn’t stop.

The others in the autopsy room exchanged unsure glances—what should they do? She was still trapped in there with them, should they—

Shrieks and groans filled the room as the barricade un-made itself. Furniture toppled and was pulled by unseen hands across the floor. Only Hodgins was close enough to be bothered by this, moving his leg so he wouldn’t be hit by the rolling cabinet. Mersye didn’t seem to mind the glass. Still unsteady, she just let it crunch under her feet (mixing with putrefaction) as the door clicked opened for her on its own.

With every step, her gait grew more confident. She remembered how to walk.

The corpses stood like monoliths. Only their heads moved to follow her. As Mersye walked into the lab, her feet left bloody footprints, cuts healing almost as fast as they opened.

One by one, the other corpses turned to walk with her.

First, the mummy’s ribs snapped, a horrible cacophony in the silence. They fell out from under the white sheet, clattering to the floor with a sound that was almost musical. It stopped moving and fell—light and stiff—to the concrete floor. Only a little spider crawled out from under the sheet.

Next there was a peculiar sound, like meat popping and tearing. The putrefied corpse fell, too, organs spilling across the floor in neatly-cut chunks. It stopped moving altogether.

Micah was last. He accompanied her almost to the platform, following her out as he’d followed her in. Nothing seemed to happen at first. The people in the autopsy room were at the wrong angle to see congealed blood bloom in a Y-pattern across Micah’s uniform shirt. The staples fell out of Mersye Sears’ chest to _ping_ at her feet.

Still, she didn’t stop.

Rain still pattered down through the broken skylight. The storm hadn’t shaken the building in a while. It seemed to be stopping, but water still flooded in from the roof, mixing with glass on the floor. It all reflected the growing light in the sky. Morning—it was coming on morning.

Mersye climbed the stairs and stood under the rain. It washed her skin in winding streaks as she gazed up at the sky for the first time in centuries. It was…so much more vast than she remembered. Even that little shattered slice she could see went on and on forever. She _felt_ the rain on her skin, and it felt like God’s mercy, after all this time.

A sound like laughter (broken and croaky) escaped her lips, and she folded her arms over her chest. Cold—she was starting to feel that, too. Men had been prodding, examining, and ruining her naked body for an eternity, but she still felt the ghost of shame at finding she was nude. Mersye stood under the sky for a long time.

Slowly, the people in the autopsy room dared to come out of their hiding places and watch her. Every move she made seemed to take forever. Eventually, she turned to look at the exit, and kept walking.

Mersye stepped over the broken frame of the front door. Something lay discarded with the glass—Booth’s jacket. The Jeffersonian team watched her reach down, grab it, and put it on. It fell almost to her skinny knees (even though she was a tall girl for her day and age). Just once, Mersye Sears looked back at the people who’d done her third autopsy, and the exit door opened for her. She disappeared without another sound.

The storm stopped. The lights went back to normal. The air seemed lighter, and morning started to creep into the sky. Something odd happened. Bones’ phone rang in her pocket.

With more than a little astonishment, Bones picked it up and looked at it. Caller I.D. read “MAX”. She answered it and held it up to her ear, half-expecting to hear that damned song again.

“Tempe? Tempe, Jesus, I’ve been trying to reach you all night!” Bones’ father said through the phone. Bones almost sobbed in relief. Even if it was a trick—even if the static came back, even if it was just a way to get her hopes up—she’d been dying to hear his voice all night. The static and the song never came back, though. Max just talked, barely letting her get a word in edgewise.

“Are you all right? Tempe, I hope you guys at the Jeffersonian have an explanation, ‘cause that storm blew in out of _nowhere_. I couldn’t reach you, so I tried to come to the office. Your daycare lady practically threw the kids at me, I’ve got all three of ‘em right here, fast asleep—Michael? Isn’t that this last one’s name? He looks like Angela.”

Bones really did sob then. With Angela at her side—frantically dialing on her own phone—Bones tried to relay that the kids were fine. Max had them. Hodgins ran his hands through his hair and sat down. His legs threatened to give out on him at the news Michael Vincent was safe.

Booth kept dialing, deleting, and dialing again—who to call first? The kids were okay, that was his first priority. After that, who could he call? Who could he tell about what just happened? Cam knew. She was on the phone already, telling 9-1-1 that they needed an ambulance. Every couple of seconds she’d switch between talking on the phone and reading the frantic texts Michelle had sent her. Michelle was supposed to be in bed—she’d let her daughter know that when she got back home.

Sweets joined Hodgins on the floor. Adrenaline was wearing off and the blood loss was getting to him. Sweets decided the floor was a cool place to chill, at least for the time being.

“…What did we just do?” Hodgins asked, mind spinning with the possibilities.

“I dunno.” Sweets said back. “But we made it. We’re still alive.”

Bones talked loudly into the phone (a habit she’d probably always have). “Yes, Max, we’ll—management will consider you for the position of emergency daycare employee. Right now, you’ve got to get the kids out of the city. We’ll meet you in Bethesda, you’ve just got to get them out. I can’t explain right now. Okay…okay, we love you. Bye.”

Distantly, the group heard sirens. It was a sound that’d probably always haunt them. But this time it was from emergency response vehicles, finally responding to the fallen crane. Booth finished his own call and pocketed his phone.

“Come on—what are you doing on the floor? This isn’t the time, Sweets, our ride’s here.” Booth said, reaching down to help pick the psychologist up.

“What? I just got here, can’t I—aww…”

Reluctantly, and with help, Sweets climbed to his feet. So did Hodgins. Cam needed a little help walking—her ankle was bruised more than she’d initially thought—but Bones was at her side. The Jeffersonian team picked themselves up, brushed themselves off, and finally headed for the exit.


End file.
